Anthropic CEO Suggests US, China Have AI Disarmament Negotiations

The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, suggested on Sept. 13 that the United States and China should hold talks about artificial intelligence to lower the risks of “potential destruction.”

In a lengthy essay published on Sept. 12, Amodei said that simply investing in risk prevention is no longer enough when it comes to AI.

He reiterated his concerns in an interview on “CBS Sunday Morning,” but CBS correspondent Jo Ling Kent asked him whether slowing down was a good idea for U.S. companies “when China will not” slow down.

“This is the toughest dilemma,” Amodei replied. “This is the worst aspect of our situation. This is the thing that most puts us in a bind. It’s not about commercial competition; this is the geopolitical situation which is the hardest to deal with.”

“We should talk with the Chinese and see if we can work together to put a speed limit on the rate of this technology,” Amodei said, drawing a parallel with the nuclear weapons disarmament talks between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ spokesman, Guo Jiakun, made his own intervention into the debate during a regular news conference in Beijing on Sept. 14.

China Cites ‘Fearmongering’

“Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest,” Guo said.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are due to meet at the White House on Sept. 24, and the governance of AI is one of a number of topics that will be on the agenda.

On Sept. 13, Trump was asked about the debate over AI during his tour of Ireland.

“We’re leading China in AI,” Trump told reporters at a golf course on Sept. 13. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.”

On Sept. 14, Trump expanded on that point.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” he wrote on Truth Social.

The president also said that the United States already has significant criminal and regulatory power over Big Tech companies.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump wrote. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

AI stocks globally slipped on Sept. 14, and the Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 indexes opened lower.

The ongoing debate was reignited on Sept. 9, when Anthropic’s Alignment Science lead, Evan Hubinger, posted on X in response to a tweet by AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who wrote, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote.

“I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

Amodei then published his essay on Sept. 12, in which he emphasized one point.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

But Amodei said that slowing down, or pacing, had to be limited by the lead that U.S. companies have over authoritarian regimes such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“If we slow down by more than this amount, then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk,” Amodei said.

He also said that he agreed with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said last week that China’s potential victory in the AI race posed an existential threat.

‘No Day After Tomorrow’ If China Wins

“Beating China—there is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this,” Bessent said on Sept. 9 at Breitbart News’s “State of the Economy” event in Washington.

“If they were to pull ahead of us on AI, then nothing else matters.”

Overnight, the CEO of one of Anthropic’s commercial rivals, OpenAI, Sam Altman, appeared to support Amodei’s call for a slowdown.

“When we talk about ‘pacing’, we do not mean ‘stopping,’” he posted on X.

“Progress has been rapid and will continue to be. But it should be slower than it otherwise could be; interventions like safety cases and monitoring have significant costs.

“The world deserves confidence that American companies developing increasingly capable AI will act responsibly, especially as the trajectory of progress has steepened.”

Reuters contributed to this report.