China warned the United States on Wednesday that the excessive use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its military could plunge the world into a Terminator like dystopian future.

US President Donald Trump’s administration has sought the unconditional use of AI startups in the military.

The Pentagon has confirmed Elon Musk’s Grok system is cleared for use in a classified setting, and blacklisted Anthropic after it refused to allow its Claude AI model to be used for mass surveillance and autonomous lethal warfare.

“Such choices as the unrestricted application of AI by the military, using AI as a tool to violate the sovereignty of other nations, allowing AI to excessively affect war decisions, and giving algorithms the power to determine life and death, not only erode ethical restraints and accountability in wars, but also risk technological runaway,” a spokesman for China’s defence ministry, Jiang Bin, said on Wednesday.

“A dystopia depicted in the American film The Terminator could one day come true,” he said.

The Terminator, released in 1984 and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, depicts an apocalyptic future in which AI-controlled robots fight humans.

The Pentagon’s row with Anthropic erupted days before the US military strike on Iran.

Claude is the Pentagon’s most widely deployed frontier AI model and the only such model currently operating on the Defence Department’s classified systems.

Anthropic infuriated Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth by insisting its technology should not be used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons systems.

Trump subsequently ordered every federal agency to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology.

Hours later, Hegseth designated Anthropic a “Supply-Chain Risk to National Security” and ordered that no military contractor, supplier or partner “may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic”, while allowing a six-month transition period for the Pentagon itself.