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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Tuesday that the United States and China should harbor no illusions about their differences on artificial intelligence as they navigate cooperation to manage the technology's risks while competing for AI supremacy, warning that Washington must balance working with Beijing against protecting America's technological lead.
Bessent, who will travel to China next week for President Donald Trump's third meeting this year with Chinese President Xi Jinping, spoke in prepared remarks to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations in New York. He said he wanted to "build a constructive relationship on the basis of balance and reciprocity."
The meeting in Shenzhen, to be held on the sidelines of the November 18-19 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders' summit, will advance a new bilateral dialogue on "superintelligence," or SI — the Trump administration's preferred term for the technology. The dialogue is meant to guard against shared risks and "prevent a misunderstanding between our two systems," Bessent said.
"We also expect to exchange best practices for evaluating and testing advanced models before their release, and for keeping human judgment firmly in command of this technology," he said, adding that the two sides had agreed to establish a direct channel for alerting each other to serious incidents. Trump and Xi agreed on the AI alert system during their previous meeting at the White House in September, though Trump said at the time he was reluctant to add new guardrails because he wanted to preserve U.S. leadership.
"As SI advances, so will the need to engage in new areas of risk management — and to demonstrate how two nations can reconcile the demands of competition with the responsibilities of leadership," Bessent said. "As we do so, we should harbor no illusions about the differences between the United States and China. As I stated earlier, our interests will not always coincide. And our approach to every challenge, likewise, will not always converge."
Bessent also pointed to trade initiatives agreed during the two previous Trump-Xi summits this year, including a "Board of Trade" to determine mutual tariff cuts on $30 billion of non-sensitive goods in each direction and China's pledged purchases of U.S. farm goods, and said a similarly structured "Board of Investment" would provide a forum for market access for American companies in China. He reiterated that the U.S. trade deficit with China remains a source of friction, but that the U.S. objective is to "de-risk, not to decouple" from trade with China.
Bessent's remarks made no mention of the controversy surrounding Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, who faces an investigation by the chipmaker's board after a New York Times report that he had an affair with a businesswoman suspected by U.S. security services of being a Chinese intelligence asset. China's foreign ministry has called the spying accusations "groundless" and "a smear." Nvidia has said its board has no reason to believe U.S. national security or company secrets were compromised.