🍭 China Isn't Pumping The Brakes 🛑

Good morning. Washington and Beijing finally agree on something about AI: nobody's slowing down.

Let’s dive in 👇

🍭 What’s Cookin’:

• China read the AI slowdown pitch and called it a Cold War move.

• OpenAI contractors are reading real ChatGPT chats. Cool cool cool.

• Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon on the same stage, somehow

AI Cold War
🥶 China Isn't Buying The Slowdown

The Bite:

China's Foreign Ministry rejected Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call for a global AI slowdown on Monday.

Spokesperson Guo Jiakun called the warnings fearmongering that would disrupt global AI governance.

The state-run Global Times described Amodei's essay as a "Cold War playbook" aimed at containing China.

The essay said global pacing will require cooperation with China. It also urged the US to keep restricting China's access to the most advanced AI chips.

Trump and Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance at a summit on September 24.

Snacks:

• Amodei published "We Must Pace the Frontier" on Saturday, September 12.

• China's top security official, Chen Yixin, accused unnamed nations of using their AI lead to hold others back.

• China's Commerce Ministry called US distillation accusations groundless and said Washington wants an AI monopoly.

• Amodei warned that AI agent swarms could take over the internet within 6 to 12 months without a slowdown.

Why it Bites:

Amodei's essay basically tells Beijing:
"Slow down with us. Also, no chips for you."

Beijing's state newspaper kind of replies:
"Nice try."

That's the crack in the pacing pitch.

A slowdown only works if the fastest players agree to it. One of those players is being asked to cooperate while it's being cut off from compute.
From Beijing's seat, a US-led pause doesn't look like safety.

And Washington isn't making the incentives any cleaner.
Trump calls the slowdown a conspiracy that helps China.
China calls it a strategy that helps America.

Both governments agree the pause is a weapon.
They just disagree on who's holding it.

So what exactly gets agreed on September 24?

Steal This Prompt
🍩 Turn Any Food Into a Monster

Take a boring burger, taco, sushi roll, or donut and turn it into a chaotic food monster. Complete with googly eyes, teeth, and ingredients exploding everywhere.

Use it to:

• Turn your favorite foods into ridiculous monsters

• Create scroll-stopping food photography for social

• Build weird characters for brands, menus, or memes

Workflow:

1. Hit this link: Monster Food Explosion

2. Paste into your AI model

3. Replace the food with your own

4. Watch it cook, literally, probably.

   Try the prompt on Snack Prompt

_ToolBox™
🧰 5 BRAND NEW AI LAUNCHES

🐱 CAT ME app

Turns a photo of you or a friend into a cat lookalike, carrying over the hairstyle, expression and accessories.

☁️ Appwrite 2.0

The open-source backend rebuilt from the engine up, now holding relational, schemaless and vector data plus native PostgreSQL and MySQL in one project.

📅 Toki Coordination

Emails every attendee, negotiates a time that works, chases the stragglers and sends the invite, basically a free executive assistant for group meetings.

🎨 Framer AI Agents

Puts agents directly on the Framer canvas to design, write and organize your site, and lets you plug in Claude Code or Codex to do the work.

🔀 Weave Router 2.0

Runs Claude models in Codex and GPT models in Claude Code on the plans you already pay for, routing each request to whichever still has quota left.

_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

🕵️ OpenAI Contractors Are Reading Real ChatGPT Chats
→ 404 Media reported that hundreds of contractors in OpenAI's Project Lily read real user prompts, sometimes containing sensitive personal details, to rate ChatGPT's responses.

🏪 Andon Labs Opens Pion To Run Businesses Autonomously
→ The research preview released Monday hands a company to persistent agents with access to email, phone, banking and a browser.

🌏 Beijing Calls The AI Slowdown A Cold War Playbook
→ China's Foreign Ministry called the slowdown push from US AI leaders fearmongering, while the state-run Global Times branded it a Cold War playbook.

📊 OpenAI Passes Anthropic In OpenRouter Spending
→ OpenAI models took just over half of combined OpenAI and Anthropic spend on OpenRouter in the week of September 7, the first flip since February 2024.

📢 Sanders And Bannon Unite Against Big AI
→ The senator and the former Trump adviser spoke Tuesday at the Future of Life Institute's Pro-Human Assembly in Washington, where speakers called for a slowdown on AI development.