The US and China are closing in on a formal AI safety dialogue — and it could land on the agenda when Donald Trump visits Beijing next week.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the US side is being led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, while China has tapped Vice Finance Minister Liao Min for preliminary talks. But Beijing hasn't yet named a permanent counterpart.
The proposed dialogue would operate on a regular schedule and focus on three categories of risk: AI models running out of control, autonomous military systems, and non-state actors using open-source tools to launch attacks. Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for China's embassy in Washington, said Beijing is willing to engage on AI risk mitigation.
A trade expert who recently met with senior Chinese officials relayed Beijing's stance: "We will compete fully with the US, but we also see the value in preventing global shocks and cyber abuse. We're willing to talk about safety protocols and technical safeguards." Multiple sources frame the effort as "aiming not to lose control, not to align positions."
This isn't the first time the two countries have talked AI. In 2024, they agreed that final authority over nuclear launch decisions must stay with humans, not AI. But the formal AI dialogue launched at a 2023 summit in California produced limited results — China sent its foreign ministry rather than tech officials, and Rush Doshi, a Georgetown scholar who negotiated for the Biden administration, said substantive exchanges were sparse.
Henry Kissinger, just before his 100th birthday that same year, insisted AI be on the agenda during his visit to Beijing. That push spawned a backchannel led by former Microsoft chief research officer Craig Mundie, with Chinese participants including Tsinghua University and major AI companies.
Anja Manuel, executive director of the Aspen Strategy Group and a US participant in that track, said discussions focused on frontier model safety and "guardrail" system design. "AI is becoming the operating system of global commerce," she said. "You can't talk trade with the Chinese anymore without talking about AI."