“What that shows is that both sides are seeing value in the discussion,” Graylin said. “Otherwise, there would not be a follow-on.”
Graylin suggested the US and China share many AI risks. Not just the supposedly existential risk that AI leaders started recently claiming required a slowdown, but also risks from bad actors like hackers or terrorists wielding AI to attack either country’s infrastructure.
There’s much that the US and China can learn from each other if they talk seriously. Graylin said that China regularly audits AI models and could share knowledge from hundreds of audits, since the US has only just begun auditing AI. What China could gain from the US is perhaps more experience auditing frontier models.
“I think both sides are going to come to the realization” that controlling AI risk will “require cooperation,” Graylin said.
Bresnick suggested that ongoing talks could be an opportunity to “explore how each side views risks.” While the US has been combating public fears of uncontrollable AI, in China, “there’s just not the same fear right now about AI,” Bresnick said, largely because the state feels that it can control AI.
That may change as China’s advanced AI catches up to the US, Bresnick said. He expects that US-China discussions could ramp up in the next six months to a year, as China starts to see the same level of emerging capabilities.
However, for now, the very different way that China views risk may deter America’s biggest rival from coming to the table to talk about risks from terrorists or hackers, Bresnick said. Especially if the US continues tying the AI safety discussion to keeping America ahead.
When Trump or CEOs like Sam Altman advocate for American-led global AI standards, all China probably sees is the US wielding safety discussions as a way to lock in its advantage, he said. Those concerns may even render Bessent’s alert system useless in the long term if China feels that “AI safety” is a code word for suppressing Chinese AI.