Trump focus on winning "AI race" may deter China from sharing safety intel. Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images This week, the US and China, the two world leaders on AI, finally started talks meant to keep the whole world safe from emerging safety risks. But whether meetings between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping can lead to a reliable global governance framework for AI depends on how much the fierce rivals are actually willing to cooperate.

It’s clear Trump wants it to seem like discussions are going well. Before Trump and Xi meet on Thursday and Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that both sides had already discussed setting up a new AI safety notification mechanism. If China agrees to participate, that would create an open line for either side to send alerts when their country’s AI systems pose threats or behave unpredictably.

The same channel, Bessent said, could allow the countries to share their "vision of common goals."However, the proposal comes at a time when China may not be ready to trust the US to have AI safety conversations that aren’t about limiting China’s capabilities. Not only has Trump steadily increased export controls that explicitly seek to block China from accessing technology to advance AI, but Congress is mulling bills that would cut the country off from more chips and hardware. Adding to tensions, just two weeks ago, Trump’s Justice Department accused six of China’s leading AI makers of stealing from US frontier labs, which China has strongly disputed.

Some US-China experts told Ars that there were concerns that China might cancel talks, but China seemingly isn’t taking offense to Trump’s rhetoric. Even Truth Social posts where Trump insists that America must dominate China on AI—declaring "WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so"—didn’t keep China from showing up. Notably, China has yet to publicly acknowledge the proposed alert system.

Even if China bought into the system, people familiar with Bessent’s plan told Politico that the plan to monitor safety alerts appears superficial, since it involves no officials with technical expertise who could be trusted to assess the urgency of risks described in communications. Describing the significance of the arrangement, one source mocked the plan, saying "the scientific, technical term is BS."Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at a Georgetown University think tank called the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, monitors national security applications of AI and US-China tech competition. He agreed it’s a red flag that there’s no tech body of tech experts monitoring the channel."It’s an existing channel, which I think is better than creating a whole new channel," Bresnick told Ars.

But if both sides had tech experts, the US and China could have really high-level conversations about how they’re assessing risk. That’s particularly important when discussing military risks, Bresnick emphasized."I think it’s better than nothing for sure, but I don’t have a lot of confidence that that is going to make a major difference going forward," Bresnick said. Low expectations for Trump talks Su Lian Jye, a chief analyst at a global technology research and advisory group called Omdia, told the South China Morning Post that the AI alerts may help "promote more transparency," but it won’t make either side less wary of the other."I don’t think the dialog will remove all concerns and differences on distillation, pricing competition, and pacing," Su said.

Praising the plan as a good start to open dialogues, Su suggested that much more cooperation would be needed to make the safety mechanism meaningful."Turning the proposal into an effective tool would require both countries to agree on risk classifications, notification triggers, response protocols, and regular review procedures," he said. Perhaps that will come up when Trump and Xi meet later this week, with AI supposedly at the top of the agenda. It’s unclear wh...