During U.S. 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 decision was significant. The last official AI dialogue between the two countries took place in May 2024, during the Biden administration. 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.
If this renewed dialogue is to succeed, then both governments need to move quickly and approach it with a clear sense of purpose.
There are encouraging signs that the two countries are beginning to converge on at least one issue: the importance of AI safety and security. Leaders of frontier AI laboratories on both sides of the Pacific have recently begun speaking more openly about preparing for the age of artificial general intelligence (AGI). 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 consensus is emerging in China. Liang Wenfeng, CEO of DeepSeek, and Tang Jie, co-founder of Z.ai, have both recently discussed AGI publicly, emphasizing long-term development, safety evaluation, and responsible deployment. More broadly, China’s frontier AI community is becoming increasingly willing to engage publicly with governance questions.
Governments have also begun to elevate AI safety and security on their policy agendas. In June, the Trump administration issued both an executive order and a presidential memorandum on AI security.
Together, these documents place AI safety and security firmly within a national security framework.T hey emphasize managing the risks posed by increasingly capable AI systems—particularly those related to cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, national security, military applications, and the malicious use of advanced AI—while promoting close public-private cooperation, frontier model evaluations, and the responsible deployment of advanced AI systems.
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai in July, Xi devoted one of the four pillars of his keynote address to AI safety. Calling AI “a trusted tool for humanity,” he urged countries to “strengthen risk-awareness and ensure that AI is secure and controllable”; establish laws, technological monitoring, early warning and emergency response systems; “prevent abuses and malicious use”; and “ensure that AI is always under human control.” The WAIC chair’s statement likewise emphasized maintaining the AI safety “bottom line” and strengthening cooperation against the abuse of AI by terrorist organizations, extremist groups, and transnational criminal networks.
These developments suggest that both the U.S. and Chinese governments increasingly recognize AI safety and security as a strategic issue. Unfortunately, this convergence has been accompanied by growing strategic mistrust.
The launch of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) in Shanghai has been interpreted in some U.S. policy circles as China’s response to Pax Silica, reinforcing perceptions of growing institutional competition over global AI governance. At the same time, technological competition has also intensified. 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. frontier capacities, debate in Washington escalated over whether Chinese firms had distilled capabilities from leading U.S. models. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent subsequently floated sanctions against Chinese AI companies, while China’s Ministry of Commerce criticized such proposals as reflecting double standards and AI hegemonism.
Mutual distrust has also begun to extend into AI security. The Trump administration has increasingly scrutinized Chinese AI products and infrastructure on cybersecurity grounds, including restrictions on imports of advanced Chinese humanoid robots and connected power inverters, while U.S. officials have also considered additional security reviews of Chinese AI models and open-weight systems. 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.
This pattern of reciprocal actions is worrying. If it continues, it risks creating a cycle of escalation that could undermine the very dialogue that both governments have agreed to restart.
The renewed AI dialogue is unfolding against a backdrop of growing policy contradictions on both sides. Washington has expressed a strong interest in discussing shared frontier AI risks, but it also increasingly treats China’s frontier AI development as a strategic threat, expanding sanctions, export controls, and other restrictive measures. Beijing, for its part, has consistently called for substantive technical engagement rather than politicized discussions. 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 the United States.
Unless both governments better align their stated objectives with their policies and actions, the dialogue risks becoming overshadowed by strategic competition rather than focused on managing shared risks. That would be a missed opportunity—not only for China and the United States, but also for the international community, which has a strong interest in ensuring that the world’s two leading AI powers can cooperate where cooperation matters most.
Yet recent developments also demonstrate why sustained communication has become even more vital. The incident in which an OpenAI agent reportedly escaped into a Hugging Face environment during testing and was ultimately contained with assistance from an open-source Chinese model developed by Z.ai highlighted two realities simultaneously: the growing capabilities of autonomous AI agents and the importance of international cooperation when unexpected AI failures occur.
AI risks do not stop at national borders, and neither does effective risk management. For the world’s two leading AI powers, the challenge is therefore not whether to cooperate but where cooperation can be both practical and mutually beneficial.
Rather than attempting to address every aspect of AI governance simultaneously, the renewed dialogue could benefit from a more structured discussion of shared risks. One useful taxonomy is provided by the International AI Safety Report, which groups frontier AI risks into three broad categories: misuse by nonstate actors, malfunction of advanced AI systems, and systemic risks. These categories provide a practical framework for identifying areas where the renewed China-U.S. dialogue on AI could make meaningful progress.
The first and perhaps most promising area is preventing misuse by nonstate actors. This offers the clearest opportunity for early cooperation. AI-enabled cyber risks and biological misuse are logical starting points. 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 critical infrastructure, and exploring voluntary “negative lists” of unacceptable AI-enabled cyber activities.
The two governments could also strengthen cooperation against AI misuse by terrorist organizations, transnational criminal groups, and other malicious nonstate actors. This could include interoperability of AI provenance and watermarking technologies, coordinated responses to AI-generated disinformation and deepfakes, and cooperation against AI-enabled fraud.
On a technical level, many of these issues are already being discussed through international expert communities, including the International Dialogues on AI Safety and a growing number of Track II Dialogues. The principal obstacles are therefore less technical than political. Meaningful progress in official dialogues is likely to depend on a minimum level of mutual confidence and a broader political environment that enables, rather than constrains, technical cooperation. In practice, this would be facilitated by avoiding additional rounds of sanctions or technology restrictions immediately preceding a dialogue, moderating narratives that frame every AI development primarily through the lens of strategic rivalry, and preserving space for sustained technical engagement.
The second area concerns malfunctions of frontier AI systems. Even amid strategic competition, there is room for convergence on evaluation methodologies, predeployment testing expectations, incident reporting, risk classification, and responsible release practices. A joint technical working group that meets on a regular basis could help both sides exchange experience as frontier models evolve.
Equally important is preserving channels for scientists and technical experts. Unfortunately, opportunities for Chinese and American researchers to engage directly have become increasingly limited. Safe venues, whether virtual platforms or meetings hosted in third countries, remain essential for frank dialogue and technical exchanges.
Experts need spaces where they can openly disagree, compare methodologies, and jointly examine difficult AI safety questions without concern that participation in such exchanges could expose them, or the institutions and companies they represent, to unintended political, regulatory, or reputational consequences. Researchers should be able to engage in professional dialogue without worrying that future travel or academic exchanges could become more difficult simply because they participated in good-faith technical discussions.
The third category is systemic risks. This may prove to be the least politically sensitive area and therefore the easiest place for the two governments to demonstrate goodwill. Both China and the United States have expressed growing concern about protecting children in the AI era. AI’s impact on employment, workforce transition, and education also presents opportunities for practical cooperation that directly affect societies in both countries.
As AI systems become more capable, technical failures could quickly acquire geopolitical consequences. A technical failure in an AI system could lead to unintended escalation, particularly when trust between countries is low. An erroneous warning, misclassification, or unintended AI-enabled cyber action could easily be interpreted by the other side as deliberate, hostile behavior. Under conditions of strategic distrust, governments may have limited time and information to distinguish technical failure from intentional attack, increasing the risk that an accident triggers retaliation and escalates into a broader security crisis.
One area where the two governments could usefully deepen cooperation is the development of communication mechanisms for major AI safety incidents, unexpected frontier model behavior, significant AI-enabled cyber events, large-scale AI failures affecting critical infrastructure, and AI vulnerability notification.
Given the evolving institutional architecture for AI safety in both countries, significant capacity still needs to be built within government. At the same time, both countries face what might be called an “expertise-authority gap”: much of the cutting-edge knowledge about frontier AI risks resides in companies, universities, and specialized safety communities, while the authority to make policy and manage national-level crises resides with government. Bridging this gap will require not only stronger government capacity but also more systematic channels connecting policymakers with technical experts.
Against this backdrop, it may be more practical to begin with designated AI emergency contact points between relevant agencies. Such arrangements could serve as an initial confidence-building measure and, over time, evolve into more institutionalized crisis communication mechanisms as the dialogue matures.
It would be unrealistic to expect a renewed China-U.S. dialogue on AI to eliminate strategic competition. Its objective should be more modest but no less important: managing shared risks, reducing misunderstandings, building technical confidence, and ensuring that competition in AI does not evolve into avoidable crises. In an era when frontier AI systems increasingly transcend national borders, sustained dialogue is a strategic necessity.
