China calls AI slowdown plan a Cold War playbook

China's foreign ministry rejected calls for a coordinated AI slowdown on September 14. The pushback puts Washington and Beijing on the same side against the AI labs pushing the pause. The proposal has no government backer on either side of the Pacific.

"Fear-mongering, confrontation, competition will just disrupt the process of global AI governance," spokesperson Guo Jiakun said. State-run Global Times went further, calling the proposal disguised containment policy and a Cold War playbook for AI governance.

Both statements arrived within 24 hours of the Trump administration's own rejection of the same plan. The overlap surfaced in CNBC's report on the two rejections, which the outlet said Bloomberg and NBC News corroborated.

A related report has Anthropic's CEO naming China as the toughest problem for his own slowdown proposal, one day after he published it. Beijing's response confirms the difficulty. It treats the plan as a move to box out Chinese AI development, not a safety measure.

A slowdown proposal built on coordinated restraint needs both major AI powers willing to hold back at once. Neither is willing, for different reasons. The US doesn't want to cede ground to China, and Chinese state media frames any Western-led pause as containment dressed up as caution. Whether any government adopts a coordinated-slowdown framework in the months ahead is an open question. So is whether AI powers keep building while accusing each other of using safety language to slow down a rival.