U.S., China should ‘harbor no illusions’ as they cooperate, compete on AI, Bessent says

The U.S. and China should "harbor no illusions" about their differences as they engage to contain the risks of artificial intelligence, while competing with each other at the same time, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

Bessent said in prepared remarks to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations in New York Tuesday that the two governments had established a new dialogue mechanism on "super intelligence," or SI, aimed at guarding against "shared risks" and averting any "misunderstanding between our two systems."

The mechanism will see both sides exchanging "best practices" for testing advanced models before they are released, and "keeping human judgement firmly in command of the technology," Bessent said, expecting both sides to alert each other to serious incidents involving the SI models.

Bessent, however, stopped short of making any commitment to limit advancement of the technology, as Beijing and Washington remain locked in an intense race to achieve global dominance in AI.

The Trump administration has largely resisted broadening restrictions on AI development over concerns of ceding a competitive edge to China, though the president has more recently signaled some openness to putting in place regulatory safeguards.

"I don't mind guardrails," he said in a CBS interview released Sunday, adding that he did not want regulations to put the U.S. in "a deep second position" behind China, which he said had no such restrictions.

China's foreign ministry in September dismissed calls to slow down frontier models, saying that fearmongering and confrontation would only disrupt global AI governance. Huiyao Wang, founder of Center for China and Globalization, a think tank that closely aligns with Beijing's thinking, said last month that the U.S.-China talks should "confront AI risks and manage them together."

During Xi's September visit, Washington and Beijing agreed to launch an AI dialogue with a communications channel to help defuse serious incidents. The two leaders are expected to meet for the third time next week, with Bessent joining, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders' Meeting from Nov. 18 to 19.

As the technology advances, the two nations will need to demonstrate how they can "reconcile the demands of competition with the responsibilities of leadership," Bessent said in his Tuesday speech. "Our interests will not always coincide, and our approach to every challenge likewise will not always converge," he added.

Washington had briefly suspended access by foreign nationals to Anthropic's Mythos and Fable 5 models in June before restoring it weeks later. The U.S. government has also restricted exports of the most advanced chips to Beijing, and accused Chinese developers of copying American models through what it calls industrial-scale distillation.

Xie Feng, China's ambassador to the U.S., told the audience at the gala that efforts by both countries were "indispensable" to addressing issues from global flashpoints to "improving artificial intelligence governance." Cooperation "may not resolve every challenge," he said, but "none can be resolved without it."

The event was organized at a time when controversy around Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang's affair with an alleged Chinese spy has been making headlines.