The United States wants a new “notification mechanism” with China to warn each other when an artificial intelligence incident becomes serious enough to threaten national security. The proposal, effectively an “AI hotline”, was discussed on Sunday during talks in New York between US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, ahead of a summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington this week. The two leaders are expected to consider establishing a broader US-China dialogue on AI, including the proposed notification system, around which details remain limited.
The initiative comes amid an intensifying contest for AI supremacy between the world’s top two economies, together with increasing warnings from tech giants that guardrails are necessary around the ever-growing technology. So, what do we know about this so-called hotline, and where is the AI battle between the US and China headed? US Treasury Secretary Bessent said Washington had proposed creating a US-China AI dialogue, with particular focus on national security and a notification system covering “common goals and common threats”.
Trump’s science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios told Fox News on Sunday that the “key thing” Washington wants to discuss is “avoiding shared risks”. Exactly what would trigger a notification has not been publicly revealed. This seems like an obvious win for both sides,” Scott Singer, co-director of the China AI Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Al Jazeera.
Xinhua said the officials held “frank, in-depth and constructive exchanges” on economic and trade issues. He and China’s chief trade negotiator Li Chenggang left Sunday’s talks without speaking to reporters. The proposed AI mechanism would not be the first time a special crisis channel was established between Washington and Beijing.
In 1997, former US President Bill Clinton and his then Chinese counterpart Jiang Zemin agreed to create a “direct secure telephone link” between their respective countries. The two countries have had a military hotline since 2008, designed to allow senior defence officials to communicate during potentially dangerous incidents. It gives both sides 48 hours to respond, though US officials have complained that sometimes no one picks up.
After the US shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon in 2023, then-US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sought a call with his Chinese counterpart, but Beijing declined the request. Earlier this month, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei warned in an essay that AI capabilities have been advancing rapidly, and he proposed pacing the development of frontier models to give governments and researchers more time to manage their risks. His assertions were endorsed by his rivals – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
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