Even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent prepares to meet Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng this weekend to discuss AI, President Donald Trump has dismissed public warnings about runaway AI as a “hoax.” Meanwhile, an editorial in the state-owned China Daily accused America’s leading AI companies of using calls for a slowdown to “blunt China’s AI advance.” Neither the United States nor China is ready to slow down. Neither trusts the other. And rapidly advancing AI systems will not wait for diplomacy to catch up.
But these realities do not mean Trump and Xi can ignore the mounting calls for the U.S. and China to talk about AI. Any such dialogue must avoid the two most common pitfalls for U.S.-China diplomacy: setting the ambitions so low that the talks become meaningless or so high that agreement becomes impossible. Aim too low, and the dialogue becomes a photo op followed by an anodyne communiqué about promoting innovation and reducing risks.
Aim too high, chasing sweeping restrictions on frontier development that neither side has the political trust or the capacity to verify and enforce, and the meeting is set up for failure. The former path fails to meet the stakes of the moment; the latter fails to recognize its constraints. A better near-term goal would be for the U.S. and China to pursue AI safety in parallel and demonstrate their progress in practice.
That effort should be anchored in technical exchanges that make each country’s AI systems safer on their own terms. The two countries should also establish a protocol to communicate about emerging AI incidents before they spiral into international crises. These steps would represent meaningful progress, far more valuable than lofty statements or unverifiable commitments.
The Trump Administration should push for technical exchanges on how to actually test models for dangerous capabilities and behaviors that neither country wants to see released into the wild. These include AI systems capable of helping amateurs develop bioweapons, or evading human oversight and control. American AI companies have been studying these risks for years, and they have also begun to appear in Chinese technical standards related to safety testing.
Exchanging best practices and new insights about how to test for and mitigate these risks could render the systems built in both countries meaningfully safer. These proposed technical exchanges would not depend on “trust” or even strict “reciprocity” between the two superpowers, nor would they require identical conceptions of AI risk. They would be driven by self-interest.
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