The U.S. and China are reportedly slated to hold discussions over artificial intelligence in September.
Such talks are likely to take place before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s scheduled Sept. 24 visit to the U.S., although the dates have not been finalized.
Preparations are still in the initial stage, and Chinese authorities will reportedly continue internal discussions on AI issues over the next month before deciding who will participate in the September meeting.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will reportedly lead the U.S. side of the dialogue.
The U.S. and China are locked in an AI race. The U.S. leads in frontier software and chip development. China is rapidly erasing capability gaps with cheaper, open-weight models and excelling in real-world deployments like robotics and industrial automation.
China’s newest open autonomous AI systems have reset the competition, rattling America’s purported lead in the AI race.
Beijing-based Moonshot AI this month released its newest frontier model, Kimi K3, which outperforms multiple American-made models across some industry benchmarks.
Back in February, Anthropic accused Moonshot and other AI labs of “distillation,” which it said involves training a less capable model on the outputs of a stronger one.
“Distillation attacks undermine those controls by allowing foreign labs, including those subject to the control of the Chinese Communist Party, to close the competitive advantage that export controls are designed to preserve through other means,” Anthropic said at the time.
Mr. Bessent said Tuesday that the Trump administration will look into whether Chinese AI models have been distilled from American models.
“If we see especially that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft,” he told Fox Business’ “Mornings With Maria.”
OpenAI and Anthropic executives have also warned about the rise of cheap AI produced in China.
Beijing’s topics of conversation in the upcoming meetings, reported by Reuters citing unnamed sources, include Anthropic’s Mythos, how the U.S. will regulate the release of future advanced frontier models and whether Washington will enact restrictions on Chinese open-weight models.
The September deliberations would mark the first official U.S.-China discussions regarding AI under President Trump.
In May, Mr. Bessent said future talks would be “aimed at halting proliferation of powerful AI models” to “nonstate actors,” adding that meetings could begin “within the next four to eight weeks.”
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.