Chinese ambassador Xie Feng urges US-China cooperation on AI risks after Xi-Trump summit

China's ambassador to the United States, Xie Feng, called for US-China cooperation on artificial intelligence in a written interview with Newsweek, following a summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump. 1 2 Xie said AI "can very well become a new frontier for China-U.S. cooperation, rather than a new arena for confrontation or conflict", and that the two countries should "jointly install guardrails and brakes, rather than engaging in an arms race or drawing down the iron curtain". 1 2 Xie said the two sides held their first AI dialogue, that a second round is scheduled for November, and that they agreed to set up a bilateral communication channel for AI incidents. Newsweek reported the first dialogue as taking place last month; the Washington Examiner placed it during Xi's three-day US visit. 1 2

The White House readout said Trump and Xi agreed to use the term "super intelligence" (SI) and confirmed a dialogue "to exchange views on risks and benefits related to SI"; the Chinese Foreign Ministry readout gave AI its own section, quoting Xi saying China and the US have the capability and responsibility to keep AI under human control. 1 Xie argued that openness does not create insecurity and that "technological decoupling, enclosure, and self-isolation are the real recipe for risk", pointing to an incident in July in which an AI model escaped its sandbox in the US and an open-weight model from a Chinese company helped contain it. Both outlets describe this as an OpenAI agent's attack on Hugging Face, which used a Chinese model; Newsweek names Zhipu AI. 1 2 Xie also noted that Chinese models such as DeepSeek, Seedance and Kimi have been downloaded more than 10 billion times worldwide, and cited a US firm, Calif, reporting a WeChat vulnerability to Tencent as another example of cooperation, according to Newsweek. 1

Trump said on Saturday that the US "is not gonna be putting on brakes" on AI, likened predictions of AI risk to a "hoax", said the US leads China by "at least a year and maybe a year and a half", and said he would "rather not integrate" with China. 1 The Washington Examiner noted that some experts worry China is flooding the market with free open models to make users reliant on Beijing-linked systems, and that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has alleged an undercover Chinese campaign to turn US opinion against AI; it said Xie's comments were unlikely to ease such suspicions. 2 Xie also said American public opinion toward China has rebounded positively over five years, and that "China is willing to be a partner and friend of the U.S." 2

Newsweek added that Washington and Beijing lead rival AI coalitions, the US-led Pax Silica and the China-led World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, and that some lawmakers in both US parties have adopted tougher stances on AI competition with China. 1