China's AI leaders keep quiet despite U.S. 'publicity' on tech risks

BEIJING — While frontier U.S. labs have sounded the alarm on artificial intelligence in recent high-profile speeches, Chinese companies have largely kept quiet.

Z.ai, Moonshot, MiniMax, Alibaba and Tencent have not made similar comments, and did not provide any statements when contacted by CNBC about the warnings from Silicon Valley.

It's important to be prudent about AI, but the publicity is "a little bit oversold," said Ray Von, founder, CEO and chairman of Tencent-backed OpenPie, a startup building devices for companies to use AI securely on internal data.

"That's why in China, we don't pay too much attention to that, because that's not the first time [the U.S. execs] say these things," he said in a phone interview Tuesday. "They should just do it."

OpenAI's Sam Altman , Elon Musk and Anthropic's Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in AI development over the weekend due to uncontrollable risks. Despite the rare display of industry unity, Nvidia's Jensen Huang pushed back by saying speed and safety can happen together, and said developers should act responsibly.

Amodei, in his latest essay , urged U.S. companies to still maintain a lead over China , echoing a paper his company published in May .

China's foreign ministry on Monday called the U.S. executives' comments " fear-mongering ." English-language state media op-eds used " Cold War playbook " and " Dr. Frankenstein " to describe the AI warnings.

"Once Chinese companies have created superior AI, we see U.S. companies issuing AI warnings. I don't think this is a coincidence," Renjie Guo, founder and CEO of JoyIn, said in Chinese translated by CNBC.