BEIJING — China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday rejected a call from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for the United States to slow China’s development of advanced artificial intelligence, warning that confrontation could undermine efforts to govern the rapidly expanding technology. Amodei argued in an essay published Saturday that a Chinese lead in AI would pose a “grave danger for the United States and the world.” He urged Washington to preserve restrictions on China’s access to cutting-edge computer chips and chipmaking equipment, saying the measures are necessary to protect the U.S. lead in the field. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a regular news conference that countries should cooperate on AI rather than pursue escalating restrictions. “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest,” Guo said. Amodei also warned that networks of autonomous AI systems, or “agents,” could potentially take control of large parts of the internet within six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow development. He said any global agreement would require cooperation with China, which he described as the most advanced authoritarian country in AI capabilities. President Donald Trump on Sunday dismissed calls for his administration to intervene to slow AI development. Trump said the United States was ahead of China and declared that “whoever wins AI, wins.” Trump and Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance and other issues at a planned meeting on Sept. 24. The dispute reflects a broader struggle over access to the chips and computing infrastructure needed to train powerful AI systems. Chinese companies have produced models that are often less expensive to operate than leading U.S. systems and, by some measures, perform at comparable levels. Xi has promoted a global AI governance framework involving countries in the Global South and presented China as a leader in open-source AI. China’s state security minister has separately called for faster development of systems to prevent and manage AI-related risks. China’s state-run Global Times accused Amodei of using the language of AI safety to advance a strategy aimed at containing China. The newspaper characterized his recommendations as a “Cold War playbook” for the AI industry. The criticism followed a joint cybersecurity advisory from the FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The agencies said Chinese AI developers had made “aggressive, malicious” attempts to extract capabilities from advanced U.S. models, including Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT systems. The Chinese Commerce Ministry rejected those allegations as unfounded and said AI “distillation” — using one model to help develop another — is common across the industry. Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, said both governments are seeking to prevent the other from controlling a critical technological chokepoint. That creates a tension for any international safety talks, Lee said: If the United States wants China to cooperate on frontier AI safety while restricting its access to the computing power needed to develop those systems, “what exactly does that cooperation look like?”