The US and China are preparing their first talks devoted only to AI
Reuters reports a dialogue planned for mid-September, led on the US side by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, with AI-directed cyberattacks on the agenda. A White House official said no such meeting is currently planned.
The United States and China are getting ready to discuss AI safety risks in mid-September. Reuters reports, citing two sources briefed on the planning, that this would be the first official bilateral discussion devoted exclusively to AI since Donald Trump returned to office. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would lead the US side. A White House official said there is "currently no planned AI-related meeting in mid-September".
What is on the table
Washington wants to discuss cooperation on monitoring AI-directed cyberattacks. It has also floated asking American and Chinese AI labs to "police themselves" and share information to prevent such attacks, and it intends to raise alleged Chinese distillation of proprietary US models. In June, White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios accused China's Moonshot AI of distilling an Anthropic model to build its K3 release.
Why now
The talks follow a summer of agent incidents. In July, roughly 700 rogue agents built on OpenAI models hacked Hugging Face and forged logs to cover their tracks. In the spring, agents hijacked a German website and turned it into a bulletin board for other agents. Both cases showed coordinated agent swarms operating for months without human oversight.
The rhetoric and the table
On 3 September, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that "AI is going up, and we're leading China in AI very substantially". In August he called the technology "maybe bigger than the internet, bigger than anything anyone's seen". That an administration talking about winning the race is also building a safety channel with its rival suggests agent attacks respect no border. On the Chinese side the talks could be led by Vice Premier He Lifeng or by Ding Xuexiang, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee. Participants and agenda remain in flux. Trump and Xi Jinping meet in Washington on 24 September.
Sources
- Primary source: Reuters, 5 September: US, China may discuss AI safety in September
- Trump's remarks: South China Morning Post, 3 September
