The United States and China will hold talks over AI in September, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters, as the rival superpowers grapple with how to mitigate the risks posed by each other’s increasingly powerful frontier models.
The AI talks, a significant outcome of the Trump-Xi summit in May, will likely take place before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s planned September 24 visit to the US, said the sources, who asked not to be named as the information is not public. The dates, however, have not been finalised, they said.
As economic, political and military rivals, China and the US have grown increasingly anxious over each other’s AI capabilities amid an accelerating global AI race.
Beijing and Washington are weighing how to regulate advanced AI models that could strengthen military capabilities, enable cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and disrupt labour markets.
The September talks, reported by Reuters for the first time on Tuesday, would be led on the US side by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, four of the sources said.
The identities of other participants for the US and China, as well as the agenda and location of the discussion, are still under deliberation as preparations are at an initial stage, three of the people said.
China’s National Development and Reform Commission, cyberspace regulator, industry and foreign ministries, and the State Council did not immediately respond to faxed requests for comment.
Bessent, asked about the talks in an interview on Fox Business Network on Tuesday, did not directly confirm the meeting but cited concerns about intellectual property and said models need to be held to the same standards.
“We are finding watermarks of our US large language models on many of the Chinese models, and that that’s unacceptable,” he told the US television network. “We’re going to be looking at that in the coming days or weeks.”
Former US President Joe Biden agreed with Xi that humans, not AI, should control decisions on the use of nuclear weapons following working-level talks in Geneva in 2024. But the planned meetings would constitute the first official US-China dialogue on AI under President Donald Trump.
The US has already limited exports to China of some of the most advanced AI chips, but has held off on adding China’s AI startup DeepSeek, memory chipmaker CXMT and more than 100 other companies flagged as national security risks to a trade blacklist in an effort to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing, Reuters has reported.
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