Amodei's export-controls essay draws Beijing fire and a Trump rebuke

Anthropic's chief executive has put the company squarely in the middle of US-China tension over AI, and both Washington and Beijing are pushing back. Dario Amodei's 12 September essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier," argued that US chip export restrictions on China must stay in place, called for a ban on "distillation" — Chinese labs training on the outputs of US models — and warned that a Chinese lead in AI "would pose grave danger for the United States and the world."

China's Foreign Ministry answered directly on Monday. Spokesperson Guo Jiakun told a regular briefing that "fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance — which serves no one's interest," and called for all parties to work together on AI, according to 1News. State-run Global Times had already gone further, branding the essay "packed with containment provisions targeting China" and, "in essence, a 'Cold War playbook' for the AI sector," The Korea Times reported.

The essay landed days after the FBI, NSA and CISA issued a joint advisory accusing Chinese AI developers of "aggressive, malicious" efforts to distil capabilities from Claude and GPT. China's Commerce Ministry called that advisory groundless. Anthropic had separately published a threat report on 10 September naming seven Chinese labs over fraudulent accounts, giving Beijing's critics a second target alongside Amodei's essay.

Amodei is also taking fire from the other direction. Trump criticised his calls for AI guardrails, meaning the Anthropic chief is now contesting export-control policy with Beijing while defending his safety stance against the White House. The clash comes ahead of a planned 24 September meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping, where AI governance was expected to be on the agenda.

Anthropic has staked out the most hawkish public position of any major US AI lab on China, and it is now absorbing the diplomatic cost. A foreign ministry rebuke and Global Times branding put the company in state media's crosshairs just as Washington weighs new export rules — exposure that OpenAI and Google DeepMind, which have stayed quieter, do not carry. For Anthropic, the payoff is influence over the same policy debate; the risk is that its named threat report and Amodei's essay become the evidence China cites when it accuses the US of containment. With Trump and Xi due to discuss AI governance directly, Amodei's essay is now part of the backdrop to that meeting, whether Anthropic intended that or not.