China Rebuffs U.S. “Fearmongering” in Light of AI Pacing Calls

China on Monday rejected calls from top U.S. tech executives on pacing frontier AI development while maintaining a lead over China to ensure America’s national security.

“The development of artificial intelligence concerns the common well-being of all humanity. All parties should jointly promote an open, inclusive, universally beneficial, and ethically sound approach to AI,” Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a press briefing on Monday.

“Fearmongering and engaging in confrontation and malicious competition will only disrupt the global AI governance process and serve no one’s interests,” Guo said, when asked about proposals to slow down AI development from Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

Over the weekend, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei laid out a plan to slow down AI development without sacrificing the U.S.’s lead over China. The call for pacing has been echoed by Altman and Musk. Monday’s rebuff underscores Beijing’s concern that Washingon could leverage AI safety to impose further restrictions on China.

On Sunday, Chen Yixin, China’s Minister of State Security, penned an article that warned of rising AI-enabled cyber and security threats posed by “hostile forces,” and singled out models developed by Anthropic and OpenAI. “Marked by the recent launch of models such as ‘Claude Mythos’ and ‘GPT-5.5-Cyber’ by US tech companies, artificial intelligence technology is significantly boosting the efficiency of network vulnerability discovery, malware development, and weaponization capabilities.

“Certain nations and organizations now possess the ability to rapidly mine vulnerabilities in bulk, automatically stitch together attack chains, and execute complex hacking operations. This dramatically lowers the technical threshold and cost of launching cyberattacks, posing severe risks and hazards to China’s critical information infrastructure,” Chen wrote in the article.