Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in prepared remarks Tuesday that the United States and China have begun a new dialogue on superintelligence, including practices for testing advanced models and a direct channel to alert each other to serious incidents. In remarks prepared for a National Committee on U.S.-China Relations gala in New York, Bessent said he will join President Donald Trump in Shenzhen, China, next week, “where the two leaders will meet.” Reuters and CNBC also reported the remarks.
Bessent said that “at President Trump’s direction, we have begun that important work by establishing a new dialogue with China on SI, designed to guard against shared risks and prevent a misunderstanding between our two systems.” He abbreviated superintelligence as SI. “We also expect to exchange best practices for evaluating and testing advanced models before their release, and for keeping human judgment firmly in command of this technology,” he said. “Finally, we are establishing a direct channel to ensure that either nation can promptly alert the other to serious incidents involving its SI models.”
Reuters reported that the Shenzhen meeting, on the sidelines of the Nov. 18-19 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders summit, will advance the dialogue. Reuters and CNBC said it would be the third Trump-Xi meeting this year. Bessent said Trump traveled to Beijing in May and Xi visited Washington in September. AI Tech Daily reported in September that Bessent had proposed an AI incident notification mechanism with China ahead of that Washington visit, and later covered how Trump and Xi discussed AI guardrails at the White House summit. Reuters said Trump and Xi agreed on the alert system at that meeting.
“As we do so, we should harbor no illusions about the differences between the United States and China,” Bessent said, after arguing that the two nations would need to “reconcile the demands of competition with the responsibilities of leadership.” “As I stated earlier, our interests will not always coincide,” he said. “And our approach to every challenge, likewise, will not always converge.”
CNBC reported that China’s ambassador to the United States, Xie Feng, told the same audience that efforts by both countries were “indispensable” to addressing issues from global flashpoints to “improving artificial intelligence governance.” Cooperation “may not resolve every challenge,” Xie said, according to CNBC, but “none can be resolved without it.”