US and China agree to dialogue on AI ahead of Trump-Xi meeting

The US and China have agreed to set up an AI dialogue ahead of a high-stakes summit on Thursday in Washington between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.

US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent announced the move following talks with Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng in New York on Sunday.

The announcement follows recent warnings by AI industry leaders that humans could lose control of the technology without a slowdown in research.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer said the two sides had also formalised a "board of trade" that they had discussed when Trump met Xi in May in Beijing.

"We just had a very successful engagement with the Chinese on trade and AI, completing where we left off in Beijing," Bessent said at JPMorgan's headquarters in New York where the US and Chinese delegations held a day of talks before the summit.

"[In Beijing] we created the board of trade and began the subject of AI, and this evening those were operationalised, Bessent said.

Bessent said the US had also proposed creating a "notification mechanism" to deal with AI incidents related to national security, and that the AI dialogue would help establish "a shared vision of common goals and common threats.

"We think that just like any cross border activity that is moving from opaque to more transparency between the number one and number two AI powers in the world is very important," he added.

The two sides had been expected to discuss a range of issues, including AI, Taiwan, Iran and the possibility of extending the one-year trade war truce that Trump and Xi signed in Busan, South Korea, last October.

Trump will welcome Xi at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday ahead of their summit the following day that will include a state dinner for the Chinese leader.

The summit comes four months after Xi hosted Trump for a state visit in Beijing. The visit marks the first meeting between the leaders on US soil since they met at Mar-a-Lago in 2017 shortly after Trump started his first term as president.

One of the key issues on the agenda in New York on Sunday was expected to be whether the two sides could reach agreement on extending the Busan truce, which paused a dangerous trade war between the superpowers.

In Busan, the US agreed to postpone the introduction of export controls that would have affected thousands of Chinese companies, while China said it would delay the imposition of sweeping export controls on rare earths.

China had pushed to extend the truce until the end of Trump's second term in office, according to people familiar with the talks. But the US had resisted that and was trying to limit the extension to six months, partly because it believed that Beijing was not living up to the commitments it made on rare earths.