Chinese State Media Criticizes Anthropic CEO’s Remarks on ‘Need to Regulate China’s AI’ as ‘Inappropriate and Hostile’

[Financial News] After the CEO of U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic called for measures to slow the pace of AI development and argued that strong restrictions were needed to delay China’s AI advances, Chinese state media pushed back, calling the claims “hostile and unfounded, driven by commercial interests.”
On the 14th, the Global Times, an English-language newspaper affiliated with the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, cited experts as criticizing Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO. The experts said Amodei had recently described China’s AI development as a security threat in a blog post and called for restrictions on semiconductors, computing power, and AI models.
In a post published on the 12th local time, Amodei said, “China taking the lead in AI would pose a significant risk to the United States and the world,” urging the U.S. government and companies to work together to effectively implement restrictions targeting China.
He particularly emphasized that such measures could slow China’s development over the next three to five years and widen the U.S. lead, calling this period the time when AI would become most geopolitically important.


The Global Times noted that Amodei mentioned China 12 times in the post and warned that it “risks turning AI security from a cooperative task among major powers into a geopolitical zero-sum game.”
Xiang Ligang, a Chinese telecommunications and technology policy expert, told the Global Times that the claims were “inappropriate, unfounded, and hostile.” He added, “He says China should cooperate to slow the pace of global AI development, while arguing on the other hand that semiconductors, computing power, and models should be restricted to slow China’s AI development.”
Experts broadly agreed that his claims reflected commercial interests aimed at increasing Anthropic’s corporate valuation.
Liu Xiaoshan, head of embodied AI at the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, who said he had previously worked with Amodei, noted that as AI is increasingly viewed as a technology that determines national competition and security, AI companies will also be assessed as “strategic infrastructure” rather than ordinary technology firms. He said, “This increases the policy importance of these companies and raises barriers to entry in the industry and their corporate valuations.”


Xiao Qian, deputy director of the Institute for AI International Governance of Tsinghua University, also noted that Anthropic is facing competition from China’s rapidly developing open-source AI models.
The Global Times also introduced reports from Western media questioning Amodei’s claims.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that some experts questioned whether his claims were aimed at concentrating control over the technology rather than improving AI safety. The Atlantic has also reported that some observers view the proposals as an attempt by existing AI companies to raise barriers to entry in the technology sector.
The Global Times added that, unlike the United States, China is expanding its open-source AI ecosystem, and that cumulative downloads of Chinese open-source large language models (LLMs) have exceeded 10 billion.

[email protected] Lee Seok-woo, International Affairs Specialist Reporter