How China sees US calls for AI slowdown. Its companies now get more room to catch up

The calls for restraint come as China seeks to expand its AI capabilities and reduce its dependence on technologies controlled by the US.

The debate over the rapid development of artificial intelligence has taken a new turn with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for a slowdown in AI development so that safety measures can catch up. He has warned that AI swarms could potentially take over the internet. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk also supported such calls for restraint.

In China, the call for restraint has prompted questions about who benefits from slowing down AI. Lai Jiaqi, a commentator, argues that a slowdown proposed by leading US AI companies would not affect all participants equally.

Top US AI companies have the most computing power, capital, and fully developed software ecosystems, putting them at the forefront of the industry. For these companies, slowing down could consolidate their advantage, while for those trying to catch up, it could reduce the opportunity to close the gap. As Lai puts it, when the vehicles are in different positions, applying the brakes can produce different outcomes.

The Chinese discussion places this argument within the wider technological competition between China and the US. It sees the US as having advantages in cutting-edge chips, advanced models and private capital, while China is narrowing the gap through open-weight models, lower-cost deployment, industrial applications and large-scale diffusion.

The two sides also face different constraints: China is limited by access to advanced AI chips, while the US faces constraints related to power, grid connections and data-centre construction. Chinese companies have responded by focusing more on efficiency, including model distillation, sparsity, quantisation and inference optimisation.

An article on CRI Online similarly argues that US AI companies are caught between safety concerns and the need to maintain technological leadership. They may support collective safety measures, but slowing down could give competitors, including China, an advantage. The article also points to weak or fragmented US regulation and concerns that coordinated slowdowns could raise antitrust issues.

These differences in the competitive landscape help explain, in part, why Chinese companies such as DeepSeek, Zhipu and MiniMax continue to release new models, raise capital and expand their computing infrastructure, suggesting that continued development is seen as an opportunity to narrow the gap with US leaders.