During U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing in May, he and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to initiate an intergovernmental dialogue on artificial intelligence. The decision was significant. The last official AI dialogue between the two countries took place in May 2024, during the Biden administration. Given the extraordinary pace of AI development and the growing number of incidents involving frontier AI systems, it is remarkable that the world’s two leading AI powers have gone more than two years without an official conversation on one of the most consequential technologies of our time.

If this renewed dialogue is to succeed, then both governments need to move quickly and approach it with a clear sense of purpose.

During U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing in May, he and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to initiate an intergovernmental dialogue on artificial intelligence. The decision was significant. The last official AI dialogue between the two countries took place in May 2024, during the Biden administration. Given the extraordinary pace of AI development and the growing number of incidents involving frontier AI systems, it is remarkable that the world’s two leading AI powers have gone more than two years without an official conversation on one of the most consequential technologies of our time.

If this renewed dialogue is to succeed, then both governments need to move quickly and approach it with a clear sense of purpose.

There are encouraging signs that the two countries are beginning to converge on at least one issue: the importance of AI safety and security. Leaders of frontier AI laboratories on both sides of the Pacific have recently begun speaking more openly about preparing for the age of artificial general intelligence (AGI). In his first Substack post in July, Demis Hassabis, co-founder and then-CEO of Google DeepMind, argued that “urgent action is needed to address risks that might arise as we get closer to AGI.”

A similar consensus is emerging in China. Liang Wenfeng, CEO of DeepSeek, and Tang Jie, co-founder of Z.ai, have both recently discussed AGI publicly, emphasizing long-term development, safety evaluation, and responsible deployment. More broadly, China’s frontier AI community is becoming increasingly willing to engage publicly with governance questions.

Governments have also begun to elevate AI safety and security on their policy agendas. In June, the Trump administration issued both an executive order and a presidential memorandum on AI security.

Together, these documents place AI safety and security firmly within a national security framework.T hey emphasize managing the risks posed by increasingly capable AI systems—particularly those related to cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, national security, military applications, and the malicious use of advanced AI—while promoting close public-private cooperation, frontier model evaluations, and the responsible deployment of advanced AI systems.

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai in July, Xi devoted one of the four pillars of his keynote address to AI safety. Calling AI “a trusted tool for humanity,” he urged countries to “strengthen risk-awareness and ensure that AI is secure and controllable”; establish laws, technological monitoring, early warning and emergency response systems;........

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