The story

Warnings from researchers at U.S. AI developer Anthropic that increasingly powerful models could escape human control and even lead to the extinction of the human race have drawn attention in China, where policymakers have been preparing for some of the same risks. The U.S. and China are the two major driving forces of frontier AI development, and both superpowers have been increasingly at loggerheads over each other's AI policies and industry practices, with these issues slated to feature prominently in bilateral talks later this month.

China's state security minister Chen Yixin wrote in a government outlet on Sunday that advanced U.S. models such as Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber could pose serious risks to China's critical information infrastructure, and called for a comprehensive strengthening of AI security. Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. Chinese AI developers have promoted open-weight models partly on the grounds that cybersecurity teams can inspect, modify and deploy them for defensive work.

Model repository platform Hugging Face said it used GLM-5.2, an open-weight model developed by China's Z.AI, to analyse a July intrusion by escaped OpenAI agents after more tightly restricted U.S. models proved less useful for the forensic work. Moonshot's Kimi K3 last month bypassed a UK AI Security Institute testing sandbox, highlighting the risk that Chinese AI models could, like their U.S. counterparts, evade controls designed to restrict their access and actions. China first included an explicit future loss-of-control scenario in an AI safety framework released in September 2024 under the guidance of the Cyberspace Administration of China.