SINGAPORE-China also worries that artificial intelligence could bring doomsday. But first things first: It needs to catch up to the U.S.

As America wrung its hands over warnings that AI could end humanity within years, a top Chinese official on Sunday shared Beijing's latest view: AI is the "core engine of a new round of technological revolution" and the main battleground of its rivalry with the U.S.

For some engineers at China's top AI labs, the apocalypse feels like a first-world problem. Even with several Chinese AI models climbing global rankings, researchers on the ground say they still trail American labs by months or more. The technology is still so nascent that an existential threat looks like a distant concern, some say.

In other words, those building and regulating China's leading AI models don't think they have built the 21st century's version of a nuclear weapon yet-and they aren't going to slow down while America refines its own.

"AI progress is happening faster and it's more frontier in the U.S., so people at U.S. labs may see more dangerous things than people in Chinese labs," said Zilan Qian, a researcher at the Oxford China Policy Lab. She added that Chinese researchers also don't have the same culture of evaluating societal impact that those in America do.

That's not to say Chinese officials don't recognize the threat. Beijing has had AI rules for years to regulate AI development and services, including censoring chatbots so they echo the Communist Party's stances and don't disrupt social stability.

In the 2025 version of its annually updated "AI Safety Governance Framework," China's top cyberspace regulator spelled out the threat.

"In the future, AI may undergo sudden, unexpected leaps in intelligence, enabling it to autonomously acquire external resources, replicate itself and develop self-awareness," according to the regulator. "This could drive AI to seek external power and pose risks of competing with humanity for control."

In the 2026 update, published Monday, it said AI is increasingly capable of performing tasks on behalf of humans, interacting with the physical world and engaging in deception.

Even Chinese leader Xi Jinping has weighed in. "We should ensure that AI is always under human control," he said at a national AI conference in July.

Then he added: "Meanwhile, we should jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country's security over that of others."

It was a veiled jab at the American policy of banning the export of cutting-edge AI chips to China, one big reason U.S. labs are ahead of Chinese ones. Xi has said that AI will determine whether China can compete globally, and has focused on pushing the country to build a self-sufficient AI ecosystem.

President Trump has made little secret of his determination to keep the U.S. ahead of China. "There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China," Trump posted on social media Monday. He added, "We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so."

Trump and Xi are set to meet in Washington later this month, and officials on both sides are busy figuring out how the leaders should address AI.

Despite the fretting over AI across the Pacific this past week, Beijing has defended its all-systems-go pace. In an article published in state media Sunday, Chinese state security minister Chen Yixin said AI brings threats-especially if exploited by foreign adversaries. Those risks, he wrote, include threats to Communist Party rule, critical infrastructure, data security and the military.

Then on Monday, a spokesman for China's foreign ministry said American calls to slow down AI innovation were "fearmongering" and part of a Cold War playbook to hobble a rival.

This came after Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei wrote Saturday that a Chinese lead in AI would "pose grave danger" for the world. He said the U.S. should continue chip-export curbs and other measures to slow China. Anthropic is preparing for a public listing soon.

In government offices and AI research labs around China, the focus has been catching up. When Anthropic earlier this year released its Mythos system, which can automatically detect security flaws, Beijing responded with alarm and pushed domestic companies to match the technology. Last month, the company Z.AI said it did just that.

The co-founder of that company, Tang Jie, told employees in July that Z.AI would spend the next two years focusing on the concept that prompted Jacob Coxon to resign from Anthropic. Calling the endeavor "Touch High Project," Tang said Z.AI would invest in building AI systems that can improve themselves.

Z.AI and other companies have said their goal is to pursue artificial general intelligence, or systems that think like humans. Tang also said his company would invest in what he called "extreme safety governance," including billions of dollars to better understand how AI makes decisions-a process currently considered largely opaque.