Heated rhetoric highlights tensions over how quickly artificial intelligence should advance and who should shape its future amid mounting safety concerns
3-MIN READ3-MIN ListenChong Ming LeePublished: 8:30pm, 15 Sep 2026A DeepSeek engineer has issued a stark warning about the potential concentration of advanced artificial intelligence and resources in proprietary US developers Anthropic and OpenAI, intensifying a growing debate in China over calls by US industry leaders to “pace” AI development amid safety concerns.The comments preceded an expected meeting between President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump on September 24, where AI safety may emerge as a key point of dialogue as the two countries race for technological supremacy.Liu Shengyu, a DeepSeek engineer behind the company’s V4.1 models, said he did not trust Anthropic or OpenAI to make cutting-edge AI “open and affordable”, contrasting their closed-source approach with DeepSeek’s embrace of open-source models.
“I especially don’t want Anthropic to master the most advanced artificial intelligence or AGI,” he wrote in a social media post on Monday. AGI broadly refers to AI systems that match or surpass human-level intelligence.
