Two Empires Promise to Police the AI They're Racing to Build

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood before the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations in New York on Tuesday and told the room that Washington and Beijing should "harbor no illusions" about their differences. Then he announced a new dialogue mechanism on "super intelligence," or SI, built to guard against "shared risks" and avert any "misunderstanding between our two systems." Two states, one conversation, no one else invited.

Who Has the Power

Here's what the mechanism actually promises: both governments will exchange "best practices" for testing advanced models before release and for "keeping human judgement firmly in command of the technology." Whose judgement, exactly, goes unstated. Bessent said he expects each side to alert the other to serious incidents involving SI models. What he didn't do was commit to limiting how fast the technology advances. Beijing and Washington, the report notes, "remain locked in an intense race for global dominance in AI."

That race sets the terms. The Trump administration has largely resisted broadening restrictions on AI development over concerns of ceding a competitive edge to China. President Trump told CBS in an interview released Sunday, "I don't mind guardrails," but added he didn't want regulations to put the U.S. in "a deep second position" behind China, which he said had no such restrictions. China's foreign ministry, for its part, dismissed calls to slow down frontier models back in September, saying fearmongering and confrontation would only disrupt global AI governance.

So both capitals want guardrails, as long as the guardrails never touch the accelerator.

What They're Calling "Responsibility"

Bessent said the two nations will need to demonstrate how they can "reconcile the demands of competition with the responsibilities of leadership." He added: "Our interests will not always coincide, and our approach to every challenge likewise will not always converge." Xie Feng, China's ambassador to the U.S., told the gala audience that efforts by both countries were "indispensable," and that cooperation "may not resolve every challenge, but none can be resolved without it."

Notice who's speaking. A Treasury Secretary. An ambassador. A president hedging on a network TV couch. The people who'll live under these systems, the workers, the communities, anyone whose life gets sorted by a model they never voted on, appear nowhere in the dialogue's design.

Meanwhile, the apparatus already flexes its control over who gets to touch this technology. Washington briefly suspended access by foreign nationals to Anthropic's Mythos and Fable 5 models in June before restoring it weeks later. The U.S. government has restricted exports of the most advanced chips to Beijing and accused Chinese developers of copying American models through what it calls industrial-scale distillation. Access to computation, handed out and yanked back by state order.

Billionaires in the Delegation

The summit circus has its own cast. Controversy around Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang has been making headlines after he admitted to an extramarital affair with a Chinese businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials suspect of espionage. He joined Trump's delegation to Beijing in May and was invited to the state dinner in Washington in September. Now his presence at the upcoming summit is in doubt, while Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Mastercard's Michael Miebach could be on Trump's delegation next week, according to the South China Morning Post.

Read that again. The people shaping "AI governance" are the same executives who sell the chips, run the companies, and ride along on the presidential plane.

The leaders are expected to meet for the third time next week, with Bessent joining, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders' Meeting, Nov. 18 to 19, which starts one week from today. During Xi's September visit, the two governments agreed to launch an AI dialogue with a communications channel to help defuse serious incidents.

A hotline between two states, for managing the technology they're both sprinting to dominate. No public seat at the table, no say for the people downstream. Just the powerful, talking to the powerful, about what the rest of us will be told is safe.