What happened
The United States and China will hold talks on artificial intelligence in September, led on the U.S. side by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to five people familiar with the matter. The talks are likely to take place before Xi Jinping's planned September 24 visit to the U.S., though exact dates have not been finalized.
Why it matters
The talks represent a significant outcome of the May summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, as both superpowers seek to mitigate risks posed by each other's increasingly powerful frontier AI models. The U.S. and China have grown increasingly anxious over each other's AI capabilities amid an accelerating global AI race.
What to watch
The talks are scheduled for September and are expected to occur before Xi's September 24 visit to the U.S., though the specific dates remain unfixed.
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These talks emerge from the May summit between Trump and Xi Jinping as the two superpowers confront a shared challenge: managing the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems developed by each nation. Both the U.S. and China are investing heavily in frontier AI models—the most advanced systems capable of complex reasoning and generation—and each side has grown anxious about the other's capabilities as the global AI race accelerates. By placing Treasury Secretary Bessent at the helm of the U.S. delegation, the administration signals that AI governance intersects with economic and financial oversight, reflecting the technology's deep impact on commerce and competitiveness. The timing, anchored around Xi's U.S. visit in late September, suggests both nations view the dialogue as urgent enough to coordinate at the leadership level.
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