When President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China meet in Beijing this week, they are expected to discuss, for the first time, how to manage the risks of A.I. But in many ways, the two countries seem farther apart than ever on that question.
Both the United States and China are racing to develop A.I.-powered weapons that could wreak immense damage without human involvement. Powerful new A.I. models could enable cyberattacks that might cripple the world’s banks and power grids. Experts have also raised the alarm about how A.I. could be misused by terrorists or even become sentient and wipe out humankind.
But the United States and China are locked in a battle for supremacy in A.I. that has left policymakers and some researchers increasingly wary of engagement, even as they warn of the technology’s risks. In both countries, many policymakers fear that imposing guardrails on A.I. development — for example, curtailing the technology’s ability to create bioweapons — would give the other country an opportunity to race ahead.
In recent weeks, U.S. officials have boasted that A.I. is helping them choose targets in the U.S. war in Iran. China, in a giant military parade last year, showed off drones that were designed to fly autonomously alongside fighter jets.
Even those who favor cooperation must tread lightly for fear of political blowback, amid fraught geopolitical ties between the two countries.
For example, the organizers of NeurIPS, a major academic forum for A.I. development, announced earlier this year that they would not accept papers from researchers at institutions subject to U.S. sanctions, including multiple major Chinese institutions and companies. The organizers eventually backtracked, but many Chinese scholars said they would boycott the forum in protest anyway.
When Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont brought Chinese and American A.I. researchers together for a public forum in Washington about how the countries could cooperate on preventing A.I.-related risks, he drew fierce criticism, including from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Mr. Bessent, who is taking a leading role in shaping American A.I. policy, wrote on X that Mr. Sanders should not be “inviting foreign nationals to tell the United States how to regulate A.I.”
The two governments have clashed openly over technology in the weeks before Mr. Trump’s trip. The White House recently accused Chinese A.I. companies of “industrial-scale” theft of intellectual property from American companies. Beijing blocked Meta’s attempted acquisition of Manus, an A.I. start-up founded by Chinese engineers, citing national security concerns.
Some experts are cautiously optimistic that Mr. Trump’s visit could kick-start renewed efforts to work together. The Trump administration, which previously had emphasized deregulating A.I., has in recent weeks expressed concern about the threat that A.I. could pose to cybersecurity, after the U.S. company Anthropic announced its powerful new model, Mythos.
Cooperation on A.I. regulation is different from past efforts to manage global challenges. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed on the need to avoid unauthorized or accidental use of nuclear weapons, so they shared information to reduce that threat.
With A.I., it is unclear exactly what risks the technology will pose or how best to mitigate them.
American scholars have generally sought to discuss existential risks — such as A.I.-designed pathogens or accidental nuclear war — and the possibility of super-intelligence, or artificial intelligence with capabilities that exceed the human brain. Chinese researchers and officials have more often highlighted risks to social stability and state security. That includes A.I.-fueled misinformation and chatbots producing answers that challenge the country’s strict internet controls.
“It’s already hard enough to get cooperation on a strategic technology,” said Jeffrey Ding, a professor at George Washington University who studies A.I. competition between the U.S. and China. “It’s even harder when we don’t necessarily have a clear and harmonized view on what problem we’re trying to tackle.”
Those diverging priorities have dogged efforts at cooperation from the start. In November 2023, then-President Joe Biden and Mr. Xi announced an agreement to discuss A.I.-related risks — the first time the countries’ leaders had publicly acknowledged the topic. About six months later, representatives from both sides met in Geneva. American officials wanted to discuss the possible misuse of A.I., including by China. Chinese officials instead focused on U.S. export controls that they thought were designed to hamper China’s A.I. development.
Officials had initially described that meeting as the first of multiple. No more materialized.
In late 2024, Mr. Xi and Mr. Biden, in their last meeting of Mr. Biden’s presidency, did agree to ensure human control over nuclear weapons, rather than leaving it to artificial intelligence. But there have been no more details on that issue, either.
The United States was not worried, at first, about including China in A.I. safety discussions partly because it was confident of its technological lead, said Scott Singer, who studies China’s A.I. policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It wasn’t until early 2025, with the arrival of DeepSeek, the Chinese start-up with its own powerful A.I. model, that American policymakers fully recognized that Chinese A.I. could affect U.S. national security, too, he said.
That recognition has hardened Washington’s competitive mind-set. The Trump administration has explicitly named “winning the race” against China as a reason to loosen regulations on A.I.
Still, even as formal talks on A.I. have stalled, scholars from both countries have held informal discussions, often through academic conferences or think tanks. Participants described these meetings as vibrant, and said they have produced many suggestions for cooperation, such as an emergency hotline in case of an A.I.-related accident, or shared standards for testing whether A.I. has the ability to synthesize biohazards.
But these conversations have not been immune from political pressures.
Jiang Tianjiao, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai who has participated in many discussions with U.S. scholars, said that many Chinese scholars, especially in the security and defense communities, were skeptical of their U.S. counterparts’ intentions. They pointed to Mr. Trump’s efforts to loosen domestic restrictions on A.I. at home as proof that safety discussions were a trap to slow China’s development.
“These people believe the U.S. is talking about one thing but doing the other,” Professor Jiang said, noting that he personally supported continued engagement. In their minds, he said, “China should never trust the United States on any proposals of bilateral A.I. cooperation for all humankind. That’s just some fantasy.”
On the American side, many scholars and officials believe that China is secretly racing toward artificial super-intelligence, though Beijing has made little public mention of it, and Chinese scholars insist that it is not a focus. Beijing has, instead, publicly emphasized practical, real-world applications of A.I.
Then, there are more basic disagreements. For long-running discussions hosted by the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based research institute, and Tsinghua University in Beijing, the participants created a glossary of terms. There was no consensus on the meaning of fundamental terms such as “loss of control” of A.I. systems, said Kyle Chan, a fellow at Brookings.
“Even though these dialogues are helpful, in some ways we are still starting from a pretty early starting point,” Mr. Chan said. “There’s a lot of room to go.”
Perhaps the most important outcome for the meeting between Mr. Xi and Mr. Trump would simply be to make clear that cooperation on A.I. was politically acceptable, said Mr. Ding, at George Washington University.
“I don’t think we need a comprehensive, binding bilateral pact between both sides,” he said. “You just need to send a signal that this is a space where Chinese and U.S. stakeholders can continue to cooperate.”
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country’s global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people.
The post Will Trump and Xi Try to Slow the A.I. Arms Race? appeared first on New York Times.
