Chinese artificial intelligence developers released 16 models in a single month, led by DeepSeek and Xiaomi, even as Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei urged the industry to slow down because of mounting risks, The surge underlines how little appetite Chinese firms have shown for the "pacing" argument now being made by some leading US labs, Nikkei Asia reported on Wednesday.
Amodei has called on frontier AI companies to pace development, warning that capabilities are advancing faster than safeguards. The paper reported that a DeepSeek engineer who worked on the company's V4.1 models rejected the idea, saying he did not trust Anthropic or OpenAI to keep advanced AI open and affordable.
Other Chinese observers have also questioned the motives behind calls to slow AI development, the South China Morning Post said. The disagreement is partly commercial. DeepSeek and its peers have built their following on open-weight models, which developers can download, customise and run themselves instead of paying for access to closed systems.
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Bloomberg reported this week that Moonshot AI has closed a funding round at a valuation of about $50 billion, while DeepSeek is close to completing a $12 billion raise.
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Tensions between the two sides have been rising for months. In February, Anthropic accused DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax of running "distillation" campaigns, using about 24,000 fraudulently created accounts to generate more than 16 million exchanges with its Claude model. OpenAI and US officials have made similar accusations against DeepSeek and Moonshot.
Distillation means training a model on another system's outputs.
Security concerns have also grown. Forbes reported last month that a Chinese-speaking hacker used AI agents, including DeepSeek and Kimi models and an older Claude version, to attack as many as 100 organisations. Anthropic and OpenAI called for a slowdown after warnings about AI risks, including a breach at Hugging Face.
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