China and the U.S. Restart AI Talks; Safety Is the Likely Common Ground

The useful part

Please review the following troubleshooting tips or contact us at [email protected]. Close Skip to navigation Skip to search Skip to main content Skip to footer Analysis Beijing and Washington Can Build AI Safety Despite Mutual Distrust Practical cooperation should exist alongside competition. By Xiao Qian, deputy director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University.

How it works

• Following the release of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, and the subsequent sense of shock in Silicon Valley at how close Chinese open-weight models are to U.S.
• Meanwhile, the China National Vulnerability Database identified what it described as a backdoor vulnerability in Anthropic's Claude, prompting Alibaba to prohibit its internal use.
• However, it has yet to articulate publicly a clear agenda or specific objectives for the renewed dialogue, leaving much of the international narrative, and many of the proposed agenda items, to be shaped by...
• These categories provide a practical framework for identifying areas where the renewed China-U.S.
• In his first Substack post in July, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and then-CEO of Google DeepMind, argued that "urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI." A similar...

What to take from it

More broadly, China's frontier AI community is becoming increasingly willing to engage publicly with governance questions. If it continues, it risks creating a cycle of escalation that could undermine the very dialogue that both governments have agreed to restart. Beijing, for its part, has consistently called for substantive technical engagement rather than politicized discussions.

Example or evidence

• Possible areas for both sides to work together include developing confidence-building measures to reduce AI-enabled cyber incidents affecting critical infrastructure, identifying protected categories of...
• President Donald Trump's visit to Beijing in May, he and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to initiate an intergovernmental dialogue on artificial intelligence.
• The last official AI dialogue between the two countries took place in May 2024, during the Biden administration.
• If this renewed dialogue is to succeed, then both governments need to move quickly and approach it with a clear sense of purpose.

Details worth keeping

Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images Get audio access with any FP subscription. Given the extraordinary pace of AI development and the growing number of incidents involving frontier AI systems, it is remarkable that the world's two leading AI powers have gone more than two years without an official conversation on one of the most consequential technologies of our time. There are encouraging signs that the two countries are beginning to converge on at least one issue: the importance of AI safety and security.