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In less than two weeks, President Donald Trump will welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping to Washington. Trump says AI will be a major topic of their September 24 talks and insists America must stay ahead of China. But the race has acquired a second, more dangerous dimension: some of the people building the world’s most powerful AI systems now warn they are advancing faster than humans can safely control them.
Jacob Coxon, a researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic last week with a warning: Competition among frontier labs is driving ever more powerful systems forward before researchers know how to keep them reliably under human control. Coxon told WIRED that colleagues described the next year or two as “crunch time for humanity.”
Days later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei went further. In an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” he argued the industry must deliberately slow how fast it increases model capabilities, so safeguards can catch up. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote, proposing independent evaluators embedded inside frontier labs, coordinated safety standards among democratic nations and eventually international arrangements covering the most dangerous capabilities. He did not call for halting AI development.
What began as an Anthropic warning quickly became a rare convergence among rivals. OpenAI’s Sam Altman endorsed Amodei’s call for independent evaluators. Elon Musk responded simply, “Dario is right.” Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis backed the same direction, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that superintelligence that does not help humanity and does not remain under human control is not worth pursuing.
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None of this proves AI is about to destroy humanity, and some of the alarm deserves skepticism. Anthropic is reportedly preparing an IPO that could value the company at nearly $2 trillion. That raises a fair question: Is some of this rhetoric also advertising the extraordinary power, and therefore potential value, of its technology? Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has accused parts of the industry of stoking cybersecurity fears while preparing products to address them. The incentives deserve scrutiny. But Altman’s decision to delay OpenAI’s IPO until 2027 over safety concerns cuts against the claim that this is merely financial theater.
The first AI Cold War question was who would build the most powerful systems. The harder question is whether either side can remain in control of what it builds.
But America cannot consider these warnings in a vacuum. China changes the calculation. In earlier Fox News columns, I have warned against regulating America into technological defeat, copying Beijing’s surveillance model or treating this as merely a race between chatbots. As I argue in my book, “The New AI Cold War,” the competition spans chips, energy, data centers, cyber operations, military power, scientific discovery and global influence.
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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent captured the strategic bind bluntly: “We can’t pause. You can’t, because the Chinese won’t pause.” Trump has now stated the competing imperative just as plainly. Asked Sunday whether AI development should slow, Trump dismissed the warnings as exaggerated, saying unnamed critics were hyping things that won’t happen. “We’re leading China in AI,” he said. “Whoever wins AI wins.” He said Washington could still add guardrails.
Bessent’s concern is understandable; the administration is pursuing both speed and safeguards. Trump’s Genesis Mission links federal scientific data and supercomputing to AI research across more than 15 agencies. His June national security directive accelerates AI adoption while requiring systems to remain “robust, steerable, controllable” and subject to human accountability. A separate executive order provides for voluntary pre-release federal cybersecurity evaluation of frontier models.
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Congress still lacks a comprehensive statutory framework, but the disagreement has become more explicit. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., rejected an emergency moratorium, warning that if lawmakers rush to regulate, China will close the gap.
Former White House AI advisor David Sacks made the sharper free-market argument: Laboratories that want to slow down can do so themselves. They should not use Washington to force smaller competitors to apply the same brakes.
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Other lawmakers are proposing approaches ranging from bans on superintelligence to narrower requirements that developers test and disclose catastrophic risks. Washington broadly agrees that something consequential is happening. It does not agree on what to do about it.
Then there is China. On Sept. 8, U.S. cyber and law enforcement officials accused Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Alibaba, of distilling American AI technology “at an industrial scale.” Beijing rejected the accusations and called distillation a common industry technique. That dispute exposes the danger of unilateral American restraint. Washington can regulate American laboratories; it cannot order Beijing to accept identical limits.
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Beijing made that point explicit this week. Responding Monday to Amodei’s proposal, China’s Foreign Ministry denounced what it called fearmongering and warned that confrontation would disrupt global AI governance. Washington wants China to cooperate on slowing the most dangerous capabilities while restricting Beijing’s access to the chips and model capabilities that could close the gap.
Amodei himself recognizes this: Slowing democratic AI development beyond the American lead could let Chinese Communist Party-linked projects move ahead and create new dangers.
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Yet an unrestricted race creates a different danger. Every laboratory races because its rivals race. Every nation accelerates because it fears falling behind. That is the classic security dilemma I have warned about in “The New AI Cold War.” Actions one side takes to increase its security can drive the other side to accelerate, leaving both less secure.
The Sept. 24 summit arrives at that moment. Reuters reported preparations for U.S.-China AI safety discussions covering AI-directed cyberattacks and incident information-sharing, though the White House said no separate meeting had been formally scheduled. The choices range from racing ahead to stopping outright. Between them lie more practical options: safety requirements triggered by dangerous capabilities, independent evaluations, and narrow agreements governing catastrophic uses.
And any agreement faces a brutal problem: verification. Nuclear arms control dealt with warheads, missiles and enrichment plants that leave physical signatures; frontier AI resides largely in software, model weights and computing infrastructure. Amodei acknowledges that limited agreements on clearly dangerous applications may be more realistic than a comprehensive pause, while more ambitious restrictions become progressively harder to verify.
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That is the defining paradox of the new AI Cold War. America cannot afford to let China dominate artificial intelligence, but competition does not make technological risk disappear. Trump says whoever wins AI wins. Amodei, Altman, Musk and other industry leaders warn that winning the race will mean little if the winner cannot control what it builds. Beijing, meanwhile, says it supports AI cooperation while rejecting an American strategy designed to preserve the U.S. technological advantage.
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That leaves Trump and Xi with a harder problem than simply deciding who gets there first. The first AI Cold War question was who would build the most powerful systems. The harder question is whether either side can remain in control of what it builds. With Xi coming to Washington on Sept. 24, that is no longer merely an engineering problem. It is a problem of national strategy.
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