Guest Essay What China Really Wants on A. I. Safety Sept. 24, 2026, 1:00 a.m. ET John Garnaut Mr. Garnaut, a former China correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, wrote from Melbourne, Australia.

If there is one person who represents the frontier of Chinese artificial intelligence, it is Tang Jie. The soft-spoken data engineer is the co-founder, chief scientist and largest individual shareholder of China’s leading artificial intelligence lab, Z.ai, whose models have risen to the top tier of China’s performance tables and made Mr. Tang the flag-bearer for the Chinese A. I. ecosystem.

In some ways, Mr. Tang’s messaging about A. I. seems to mirror that of Dario Amodei, the co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic — the American company behind Claude — and one of the most prominent voices extolling A. I.’s promise while warning of its risks. Mr. Tang pairs an almost utopian excitement with what he has called the “heaviest responsibility” of “extreme safety governance.” Once a technology reaches a magnitude of power sufficient to alter the course of civilization, safety is no longer an accessory, but the fundamental precondition for that technology to survive and to be permitted for use, Mr. Tang said in a letter to staff that was leaked to the Chinese media in July.

Those words may sound strikingly similar to warnings now coming from leading American A. I. labs. But they are better understood through the language of President Xi Jinping of China, for whom A.

I. “safety” is ultimately bound to one overriding concern: the security of the Chinese Communist Party regime. While the debate in Western capitals has centered on the dangers A. I. poses to society, the animating concern in China is the threat it poses to the state.

Chinese models are already well known for filtering or avoiding politically sensitive information in ways that reflect state censorship. But developers like Mr. Tang are going further, working to embed Communist Party orthodoxy deeply into the models, with potentially far-reaching implications for the values and vulnerabilities that Chinese A. I. systems bring with them.

Recognizing these diverging views on the technology that will shape the next century is crucial in setting expectations for the talks on Thursday between President Trump and Mr. Xi at the White House. The leaders are set to discuss how to mitigate A. I. risks.

Arriving at meaningful cooperation will be difficult — if not impossible — because there are two almost entirely unrelated conversations about what A. I. safety means happening on opposite sides of the Pacific. The wider stakes are potentially enormous. Mr. Tang and his colleagues are instilling values into their models that shape how they interpret the world and respond.

As Chinese A. I. is increasingly being adopted globally, those values could travel with it, quietly carrying the Communist Party’s worldview far beyond Chinese shores. Six days after Mr. Tang’s letter to Z.ai’s staff, Mr. Xi provided a glimpse into his thinking when he convened the annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 17.

In comments translated into English by state-run media, Mr. Xi was quoted as saying that “China lays great emphasis on safety and security in A. I.” and is committed to keeping it “safe, secure and controllable.” It seemed a reassuring signal ahead of the scheduled talks with Mr. Trump. But Chinese state media often translates comments by the country’s leaders in ways that soften their political meaning for foreign audiences.

What Mr. Xi actually said in Chinese was that China’s emphasis was on “development and security,” and on making sure “A. I. is secure, reliable and controllable.” That may seem like a fine distinction in translation. But in Mr. Xi’s vocabulary, words like “security” and “control” ultimately refer to the political security of the Communist Party.

Time and again, Mr. Xi has made clear that ensuring China’s Communist system endures in a rapidly changing world is ...