By Laurie Chen
BEIJING, Sept 14 (Reuters) – An essay by Anthropic’s CEO calling for a slowing down of AI development may look like a rational statement focused on safety risks, but it is really a “Cold War playbook” targeting China, the state-backed Global Times said in an editorial.
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In the essay published on Saturday and later endorsed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Dario Amodei outlined a framework to pace the development of frontier AI model capabilities and create more time to manage mounting safety risks.
Amodei also urged the U.S. to strengthen chip export controls on China and crack down on alleged model distillation by Chinese AI labs. He then told CBS News on Sunday that the “toughest dilemma” over his proposal to slow AI advancement was if China and other adversarial nations chose not to do the same.
The Global Times tabloid said the true agenda of Amodei’s essay was “to attempt to curb China’s AI development through technological barriers and regulatory monopolies, uphold Washington’s monopolistic hegemony in cutting-edge technology, and exclude China from the global AI governance system.”
“This ‘silent AI Cold War’ is hypocritical and short-sighted,” it said, adding that excluding China from global AI innovation would “significantly increase the trial-and-error costs and risks of loss of control in global AI development”.
U.S. lawmakers have urged new rules to govern AI systems after dire warnings from two Anthropic researchers that rapidly progressing AI could lead to the extinction of the human race in the not-too-distant future.
Trump brushed aside calls to slow down AI on Sunday, saying that “very negative forces” were raising exaggerated concerns.
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“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins,” Trump said.
When asked about U.S. tech leaders’ calls to slow down AI development, China’s foreign ministry urged all parties to “promote an open, inclusive and benevolent approach to AI.”
“Fomenting various threats, engaging in confrontation and malicious competition will only disrupt the process of global governance of artificial intelligence and is not in the interests of any party,” spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters at a daily briefing on Monday.
The U.S. and China are planning to discuss frontier AI safety risks in mid-September, sources have said, and the issue could be raised during a summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping on September 24.
(Reporting by Laurie Chen; Additional reporting by Joe Cash; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
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