China's Spy Chief Warns AI Could Threaten Communist Party Rule

Beijing dismissed calls to curb its AI as fearmongering while its intelligence chief warned the technology could endanger the party's grip on power.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday rejected calls for Washington to impede Beijing's AI development, with spokesperson Guo Jiakun saying "fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one's interest." The response came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a weekend essay urging a global slowdown in AI capabilities while arguing the US should actively hold back China's progress, warning a Chinese lead in AI would pose "grave danger" to the US and the world. Yet at the same time, China's own top intelligence official was voicing alarm that the technology could threaten Communist party rule itself.

The striking element is the contradiction: while Beijing publicly rejects US containment rhetoric, its own spymaster privately harbors fears about AI that mirror — and in some ways exceed — Western concerns. According to The Guardian, Chen Yixin, head of China's Ministry of State Security, wrote in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace that "hostile forces" were abusing AI to wage a "propaganda war and a cognitive war against us, directly threatening our political security, institutional security, and ideological security." He specifically named US models including Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber as having been weaponised. A security apparatus warning that AI could threaten the ruling party's hold on power is an unusually frank admission of internal vulnerability.

Chen's warnings were detailed in an article published Sunday in China Cyberspace, a state-run magazine, where he argued AI is "penetrating all aspects of human society at an unprecedented speed, breadth, and depth." According to the New York Post, Chen warned that AI could generate fake videos and audio to spread propaganda against the ruling party, and that some actors can now "automatically connect attack paths" and complete complex hacking tasks, lowering the barriers to cyberattacks on China's critical information infrastructure. Yet Chen also insisted China must press ahead, writing that "whoever can achieve more refined perception, more accurate judgment, and more precise strikes through algorithms will gain the initiative on the battlefield," per the New York Post.

The exchange sharpens the US-China AI dispute at a moment when safety concerns are fracturing globally. Amodei predicted that swarms of AI "agents" could take over the internet within six to 12 months unless researchers agree to slow development, and other tech leaders including Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk expressed general support for his essay, though not specifically his China proposals, according to The Guardian. China's state-run Global Times dismissed the essay as a "cold war playbook" for the AI sector, while President Trump dismissed safety concerns entirely, saying the only guardrails AI needs are a "STRONG AND SMART" president. The New York Post reports Trump called safety agitation a "SICK conspiracy" that would only benefit China, declaring "WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!"

Attention now turns to a planned meeting between the US and Chinese leaders on September 24, where AI governance is expected to be among the topics discussed, according to The Guardian and India Today. The showdown of positions — Beijing demanding cooperation while rejecting curbs, Amodei urging pacing alongside containment, and Trump rejecting safeguards outright — leaves little common ground ahead of that summit.