US and China prepare first official AI safety talks of Trump's second term

The United States and China are preparing for mid-September talks in Beijing on AI safety risks, Reuters reports. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to lead the U.S. delegation. The meeting would be the first official bilateral AI dialogue since Donald Trump began his second term, and it comes ahead of a planned meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on September 24 during a summit in Washington. The U.S. side wants to discuss monitoring of AI-directed cyberattacks and alleged Chinese distillation of American models, in which outputs from U.S. systems are used to train competing ones. Washington has floated a proposal under which U.S. and Chinese AI labs would police themselves and share information to prevent AI-linked cyberattacks. The final agenda and list of participants remain unsettled. On the Chinese side, Ding Xuexiang, the country's seventh-ranked official, coordinates technology, AI and semiconductor policy. China's cyberspace regulator recently warned about extreme loss-of-control risks from AI, and a blog affiliated with state media criticized Anthropic. In June, Trump signed an executive order creating a voluntary framework for pre-release cybersecurity reviews of frontier models. The talks matter because both governments are now openly treating AI agents and cyber capabilities as a shared security problem rather than only a trade one.