Beijing responds to Amodei's essay, accuses him of AI fearmongering and calls for open, inclusive global governance

On September 14, 2026, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun responded at a regular press briefing to the essay published two days earlier by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In his essay, Amodei argued the United States should continue AI chip and equipment export controls against China and framed embedded third-party evaluators and other pacing proposals as a long-term governance path. Guo said fearmongering, confrontation, and vicious competition would only disrupt the process of global AI governance and serve the interests of no one, calling instead for an open, inclusive, universally beneficial, and ethical consensus on AI governance. The same day, state-run Global Times published a separate editorial accusing Amodei of engineering a silent AI Cold War against China and argued that his pacing proposals amount to academic and rhetorical cover for technology containment. The Chinese response came against a backdrop in which Chinese AI model usage has now outpaced US usage for twenty consecutive weeks: OpenRouter data published the same day showed 61.17 trillion tokens of weekly Chinese-vendor traffic versus 21.76 trillion tokens for US vendors, with Chinese models taking seven of the top ten spots on the platform. Tencent Hunyuan Hy4 preview ranked second globally, Zhipu GLM 5.3 Flash third, and DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 fourth; DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, released September 10, climbed to sixth within three days of launch. The response is consistent with the gradual posture adopted since August by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Foreign Ministry on frontier AI safety issues, emphasizing a balance between development and security while rejecting the weaponization of AI governance as a geopolitical tool.