**Why China is pushing back on US warnings over rapid AI development**

> Beijing believes slowdown calls aim to lock in US advantage, and is pursuing a different balance between safety and pace AI is being encouraged across the Chinese economy as a way to promote growth. Photograph: Ying Tang/NurPhoto/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen AI is being encouraged across the Chinese economy as a way to promote growth. Photograph: Ying Tang/NurPhoto/Shutterstock China Analysis Why China is pushing back on US warnings over rapid AI development Rebecca Bailey China correspondent Beijing believes slowdown calls aim to lock in US advantage, and is pursuing a different balance between safety and pace Sun 20 Sep 2026 02.00 EDT Last modified on Sun 20 Sep 2026 04.51 EDT Share About two years ago, education entrepreneur Boris But had what he calls a “penny-drop moment” – that, like countless others in China , his company needed to embrace AI before it was made obsolete by it. His clients, well-off parents looking to send their children to study overseas, had begun arriving in his office reeling off information and opinions gleaned not from rival firms, but from chatbots. In response, he started developing his own AI study tool, concluding: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” The pace and quality of AI development in China is second only to the United States, with the two superpowers locked in an intensifying rivalry as the stakes rise with each new model’s capabilities. Analysts generally agree that frontier, or cutting-edge, US models are still some way ahead of their Chinese counterparts. China bogeyman looms large over American firms’ AI doomsday scenario Read more But over the last few weeks the mood music from Silicon Valley has been decidedly sombre, as insider after insider has warned of the potential catastrophes that could result from “loss of control” of the most advanced AIs. And last Saturday Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei pitched a “worldwide pacing of the frontier ” – something he said would “require cooperation with China”. “China is definitely not receptive” to a slowdown on US firms’ terms, though, said Lian Jye Su from technology research group Omdia. For the government, AI is a “core sovereignty capability”, and Beijing will not want to jeopardise the progress made in closing the gap with US frontier models. “It sees these calls \[for a slowdown\] as a bid to lock in US advantage,” said Su. Amodei made this explicit, mentioning China specifically when arguing it was key “to keep democracies’ AI lead over autocracies as large as possible”. He advocated for measures including continued export controls to China on advanced chips and machinery – the existence of which some argue already amounts to a forced unilateral “pacing”. China’s foreign ministry responded to Amodei’s piece by saying “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance”. However, several analysts told the Guardian it would be a mistake to assume this suggested a rejection of the broader concerns raised by the essay. This week China released the third iteration of its AI safety governance framework – a document that functions as a “mapping of the AI risk landscape and roughly what one should do about it”, said Gabriel Wagner, a researcher at Concordia, a Beijing-based AI safety consultancy. Included in the updates are the risks posed by agents, the cybersecurity threats from frontier models and the issue of recursive self-improvement – an as-yet hypothetical scenario where AI becomes advanced enough to improve itself. “In many ways, I think there is more common ground than people might assume between what Amodei is saying and what the Chinese government is saying,” said Wagne...

**来源信息**
- **来源**：Hacker News：AI 热帖
- **分类**：行业
- **发布时间**：2026-09-20 17:08（北京时间）
- **原文**：[打开原文](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/20/why-china-is-pushing-back-on-us-warnings-over-rapid-ai-development)