U.S. and China face grave AI risks but mutual distrust stalls cooperation

BEIJING — The United States and China are both gripped by safety fears as they reckon with their rapid advances in AI, but intensifying competition and deep mutual distrust could derail the kind of cooperation experts say is vital to head off the strategically vital technology’s greatest dangers.Artificial intelligence is increasingly at the center of the rivalry between Washington and Beijing, and is expected to be a major topic of discussion at a summit in Washington next week between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.The summit comes as AI leaders and researchers in the U.S.warn that companies should “slow the pace” of AI development, citing recent incidents involving autonomous agents.

Trump has dismissed such concerns as a “hoax” while agreeing with executives such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that the U.S.must maintain AI dominance over China through export controls and other measures.FOR SUBSCRIBERS00:0000:00How exactly could AI cause widespread danger?02:35China, which tightly regulates AI and largely avoids the existential worries the technology provokes in the U.S., has interpreted calls to slow its development as targeted squarely at its own progress.

U.S.companies say the Chinese AI sector is being driven in part by large-scale “illicit distillation” of their most advanced models.Chinese officials, who say distillation is a conventional practice that U.S.

companies also use on Chinese models, in turn accuse America’s AI executives of trying to stave off competition.Senior Col.

Zhu Qichao, a noted voice on Chinese military AI and national security, called for “cooperation” with the U.S.while warning against “vicious competition.”“Because with the development of emerging technologies, it definitely comes with many possibilities,” said Zhu, the director of the Institute for Defense Technology and Strategic Studies at the People’s Liberation Army National University of Defense Technology.

“On one ha...