China and America must get serious about AI risk

In November 2024, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping made their first substantive joint statement about the national-security risks posed by AI.

- JAKE SULLIVAN

Specifically, they noted that both the United States and China believe in “the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons.”That may sound like diplomatic low-hanging fruit, since it would be hard to find a reasonable person willing to argue that we should hand control over nuclear weapons to AI. But with the Chinese government, there is no such thing as low-hanging fruit, especially on weighty security matters. The Chinese are inherently skeptical of US risk-reduction proposals, and Russia had opposed similar language in multilateral bodies. Because bilateral talks with the US on AI and nuclear security would open daylight between Russia and China, progress on this front was not a foregone conclusion.

In the end, it took more than a year of negotiation to make that simple joint statement happen. Yet simple as it seems, the result was significant, because it demonstrated that the two AI superpowers can engage in constructive risk management even as they compete vigorously for AI leadership.

Moreover, diplomats and experts from our two countries had also met earlier in 2024, in Geneva, for an extended session dedicated to AI risks. It was the first meeting of its kind, and though it didn’t produce any significant results, the very fact that it occurred was an important step, and both sides did manage to identify critical areas of risk that required further work.

Now, as the momentum behind AI development and deployment, both civil and military, gathers pace, the US and China need to build on this foundation by pursuing sustained, seniorlevel diplomacy on AI risks, even as each strives for the lead in the AI race. They must do so because the risks of AI are real and only growing.