AI cooperation between the United States and China is widely viewed as essential to any global strategy for AI safety, even as both countries increasingly treat the other as a strategic problem. AI governance is expected to be on the agenda at a meeting planned next week in Washington between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, a meeting that experts and industry leaders say could open limited pathways for cooperation even if formal agreements prove difficult.
AI cooperation faces political and strategic obstacles
Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies’ Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs, said, “A formal agreement or consensus may be near impossible, but they do not need to go that far.” She added that Trump and Xi “just need to create political space by acknowledging AI poses risks to both countries.”
President Trump has pushed back on stronger regulation, arguing that such measures could help China, and has repeatedly declared that the nation that leads on the technology “wins.” “We are leading China, and all others,” Trump said Monday on social media. Trump has also consulted with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang; Nvidia has generally favored some chip exports to China as a way to sustain an American AI ecosystem and a more open research relationship.
The two countries are advancing AI along different paths. U.S. firms are pursuing frontier models backed by cutting-edge chips and a rapidly expanding data center infrastructure, while China is promoting wide adoption of open-source, lower-cost models. Chinese AI models have made major advances and found users among American companies even as U.S.-led export restrictions bar China from obtaining the world’s most advanced AI chips. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the U.S. needs to develop more open-source models to counter China.
Washington has accused China of “aggressive, malicious” efforts to extract capabilities from American AI systems; Beijing has countered that the U.S. is trying to suppress Chinese companies to build a “monopoly of the AI industry.” David Sacks, a top AI adviser to Trump, told Fox News that China has “already rejected” slowing down development of advanced AI and warned, “In this case, we don’t have trust and we can’t verify. So let’s not be foolish about this and just hand the whole ball game to China.”
Industry voices urge both competition and cooperation
Leading U.S. AI firms Anthropic and OpenAI restrict access in China and have argued the United States has a national security imperative to protect its technological lead. At the same time, executives from those companies and other American tech leaders say cooperation with China will be necessary to manage safety risks.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in an essay calling for a slowdown in AI development on safety grounds, said the U.S. should slow China’s progress, including maintaining restrictions on China’s purchases of the most advanced AI chips. He also wrote that “global pacing will require cooperation with China, the autocratic country with by far the most advanced AI capabilities.” Beijing criticized the essay: China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest,” and the state-run Global Times called Amodei’s remarks “packed with containment provisions targeting China and is, in essence, a ‘Cold War playbook’ for the AI sector.”
Security concerns spur urgency and new alliances
Officials in both countries have been alarmed by emerging AI capabilities. Chen Yixin, head of China’s Ministry of State Security, warned in an article that AI poses threats ranging from political and ideological security to cyberattacks, and singled out Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s powerful models as potential vectors to “weaponize” cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Separately, a U.S. security firm recently reported AI-related vulnerabilities in WeChat, China’s dominant messaging and payment app, a finding noted by Paul Triolo, a partner at DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.
Despite officials saying after a mid-May summit that China and the United States had agreed to pursue dialogue on AI development and governance, little progress has been reported. Instead, both nations have sought to build alliances. In July, China launched the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization with 29 founding members, including Russia and Pakistan, to promote global AI governance. This month, Xi called on BRICS members to accelerate establishing a global AI governance framework and an open-source AI community. Some observers view China’s initiative as a response to the U.S.-led Pax Silica initiative, launched last year to strengthen collaboration on AI supply chains with partners including Japan, the U.K. and Australia.
Asked about expectations for the Trump-Xi talks on AI, Amodei told CBS’ Face the Nation that “the more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress,” while acknowledging such cooperation is likely to be difficult. A Chinese state media-linked social account, Yuyuantantian, wrote that “Only after the United States first demonstrates that the safety rules are equally effective for its own model companies can substantive discussions between the U.S. and China take place.”
The upcoming Washington meeting could yield superficial agreements but may also begin to carve out the political space needed to acknowledge shared AI risks and explore limited cooperation on safety.
