Bessent Urges Clear-Eyed US-China AI Talks Ahead of Shenzhen Meeting and Trump-Xi Summit

On Tuesday in New York, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood before the National Committee on US-China Relations and delivered a message built around restraint: Washington and Beijing, he said, should hold no illusions about how far apart they are on artificial intelligence, even as they work together to reduce its dangers and compete to lead it.

Bessent will travel to China next week for what will be President Donald Trump's third meeting this year with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The gathering, in Shenzhen, will take place on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders summit on November 18-19. In his prepared remarks, Bessent said he wanted to build a constructive relationship on the basis of balance and reciprocity.

The Shenzhen meeting, he said, will advance a new bilateral dialogue on what he called superintelligence, or SI, the Trump administration's preferred term for the technology. The dialogue is meant to guard against shared risks and to prevent a misunderstanding between the two systems. Bessent said the sides also expect to trade best practices for evaluating and testing advanced models before release, and for keeping human judgment firmly in command. He added that the two countries had agreed to set up a direct channel for alerting each other to serious incidents.

That alert system was agreed by Trump and Xi when they met at the White House in September. At the time, though, Trump said he was reluctant to add new guardrails because he wanted to preserve US leadership, a tension that runs under Bessent's framing. As SI advances, he said, so will the need for new kinds of risk management, and for the two nations to show they can reconcile the demands of competition with the responsibilities of leadership. He then cautioned that US and Chinese interests will not always coincide, and that their approaches to any given challenge will not always converge.

The Reuters report also touches on questions surrounding Nvidia. China's foreign ministry has called spying accusations connected to the company groundless and a smear. Nvidia has said its board has no reason to believe US national security or company secrets were compromised, and that chief executive Jensen Huang has committed to cooperating with an internal review. Huang has told employees he was unfaithful to his wife but gave no details about the relationship. He attended the Trump-Xi summits in Beijing in May and Washington in September, but it is unclear whether Trump will bring him to APEC.

On trade, Bessent invoked the first American trading voyage to China in 1784, which exchanged American ginseng for Chinese tea, porcelain and silk. The relationship, he said, will be sustained by the wisdom and the will to recognize where common purpose must prevail over competing interests. He pointed to initiatives from the two earlier summits: a Board of Trade to determine mutual tariff cuts on $30 billion of non-sensitive goods in each direction, and Chinese pledges to buy US farm goods.

A similarly structured Board of Investment, he said, will give a forum to issues including market access for American companies in China and increased predictability for Chinese companies. He reiterated that the US trade deficit with China remains a source of friction, but said the US aim is to de-risk, not to decouple.

The next markers are the Shenzhen meeting next week and a fourth Trump-Xi summit expected in December at the US-hosted G20 in Miami.