Chinese state media counters Anthropic’s call to put brakes on AI development — paper says move is ‘a response to Chinese competition’

China’s state-run newspaper has downplayed the call of Anthropic founder Dario Amodei to “pace the frontier.” China Daily, the official English mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, questioned the move, which was supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, asking if they were doing it out of concern for humanity or if they’re afraid of competition from China.

“The report, and the corporate ‘alliance’ that followed it, amounted in essence to a coordinated play — a response to Chinese competition and to the regulatory pressure coming from Washington. Its aims were threefold: to blunt China’s AI advance, to win a favorable policy environment at home and to keep investors’ enthusiasm for US AI alight,” the publication wrote. It further criticized the move thusly: “The proposed coordination among the three companies sounds rather like a club whose membership rules have been drafted before the guest list is announced. A global AI-safety framework that excludes China is not quite global.”

The paper also called out the U.S. efforts in blocking Chinese AI advancement, both through hardware, by blocking Beijing’s access to the latest Nvidia chips, and software, with Amodei’s multiple accusations of illegal distillation of Claude by Chinese AI labs. China Daily said that these efforts have apparently failed, and cited the success of the DeepSeek and Kimi K3 models, which turned out to perform well enough but at a much lower cost.

The availability of those models has resulted in many AI users shifting demand to cheaper tokens, like Kimi K3 (low) and DeepSeek V4 Pro, over the expensive frontier models like Fable 5.1, GPT 5.6 Sol, Grok 4.6, and Kimi K3 (max).

China Daily also took issue with Amodei’s focus on excluding China from his proposal. It suggests that the move is meant to widen the technological gap between the two rivals when it comes to AI technology and give American AI labs breathing room to “pace the frontier,” and that it reveals how Washington sees Chinese AI as an existential threat.

Nevertheless, Chinese policy acknowledges some of the risks that Amodei raised. The Standardization Administration of China, in cooperation with the Cyberspace Administration of China, says that the development of AI technology must be monitored as it may go beyond human control.

“Treating the AI race as a zero-sum game makes the cooperation needed to manage those risks more difficult. China and the US should cooperate where neither can manage the consequences alone,” says the state media outfit. “The planned AI-safety dialogue between the two sides and future high-level exchanges offer opportunities for practical engagement. The promise of AI lies in serving humanity’s common good, not in being weaponized for geopolitical gain or instrumentalized for personal profit.”