‘Silent Cold War’: Why calls to slow AI have sparked new US–China frontier

China has warned against “fear-mongering” after the CEO of a top artificial intelligence (AI) company in the United States sounded the alarm against AI advancement and called for restrictions on the sale of AI chips to China.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday called for the development of the most powerful AI systems to be slowed down, warning that they could soon pose potentially catastrophic risks to humanity itself.

His proposal also calls for Washington to restrict China’s access to advanced technology – prompting Beijing to accuse the US of using AI safety as a pretext to preserve its technological dominance.

The dispute comes as Washington and Beijing compete over increasingly capable AI models, with US President Donald Trump declaring, “Whoever wins AI wins.”

So, what has got AI giants worried, why is China being seen as a threat?

Anthropic’s Amodei warned in an essay published over the weekend that AI capabilities have been advancing rapidly, and he proposed pacing the development of frontier models to give governments and researchers more time to manage their risks.

“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails,” he wrote.

His assertions were endorsed by his rivals – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.