China Bites Back: Beijing Calls AI Fears a Weapon
AI-linked stocks fell across Asian exchanges, with Nasdaq 100 futures down 1.
China has dismissed urgent calls from leading American artificial intelligence executives for a development slowdown, accusing U.S. tech leaders of weaponising safety concerns to kneecap a geopolitical rival. Beijing's response, reported by NBC News, came hours after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed an open letter urging governments to impose emergency brakes on what signatories called reckless AI acceleration.
Chinese officials called the warnings "fearmongering" — a deliberate American strategy dressed up as humanitarian concern. The framing landed hard in markets. AI-linked stocks fell across Asian exchanges, with Nasdaq 100 futures down 1.65 percent, according to CoinDesk. The one asset class that shrugged was crypto: Bitcoin climbed to $78,000, rising 1.9 percent as investors rotated out of growth equities and into digital assets sitting outside the AI selloff.
The split is not incidental. It maps almost perfectly onto the new geopolitical fracture — Washington and Brussels signalling restraint, Beijing signalling acceleration, and capital markets pricing in a race that neither side intends to lose. With the Federal Reserve's two-day policy meeting now underway and a 25-basis-point rate hike widely expected, the cost of that race is about to get more expensive for everyone holding debt to fund it.
China did not slow down. It issued a statement and got back to work.
