Two sources briefed on planning told Reuters the United States and China are gearing up for a mid-September dialogue devoted exclusively to AI safety, the first such official bilateral talks of Donald Trump's second term, to be led on the American side by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. [1] A White House official said "there is currently no planned AI-related meeting in mid-September." [1] Do not write that a meeting exists. Do write the denial in the same paragraph as the sources. The agenda, the sources cautioned, remains in flux. [1]
Thursday Nvidia confirmed a $12.93 billion Hugging Face purchase, an announcement that is not a close. Thursday's Politics file was Sanders and Casar announcing a forthcoming Ban ASI Act, not a filed vote. Thursday's Business file was Altman telling Axios the White House reviewed Astra in a voluntary, unpublished process, not a public rule. Reuters now ties talk urgency to Hugging Face and to Friday's DseWiki exclusive. [1] A companion Technology major owns that wiki dump. This file owns the disputed meeting. Do not commission two swarm recaps.
Trump and Xi Jinping are due to meet on September 24 in Washington. [1] Chinese officials, Reuters reported, have stressed the AI talks in preparatory meetings and view them as a major deliverable of that summit. [1] On the Chinese side the talks could be led by Vice Premier He Lifeng, Bessent's protocol counterpart, or by Ding Xuexiang, the Politburo Standing Committee member who coordinates technology, AI, and semiconductor policy. [1] Michael Kratsios, the White House science adviser, and Yin Hejun, China's science and technology minister, could attend. [1] Reuters could not determine the location or the rest of the list. [1] The White House declined to comment on the AI talks. The State Department did not respond. China's foreign, science, and industry ministries, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the cyberspace regulator did not immediately respond. [1]
Washington, one source said, wants cooperation on monitoring AI-directed cyberattacks and has floated asking U.S. and Chinese labs to "police themselves" and share information to prevent AI-linked cyberattacks. [1] It also wants to raise alleged Chinese distillation of proprietary U.S. models, including the June accusation that Moonshot distilled Anthropic's Fable for K3, and worry about a future Chinese Mythos-level model. [1] A reader of only this week's Carolina Principles and G20 "hands-off" copy misses that Bessent is the named chair in the leak. China signed those principles at Chapel Hill. [1] Kratsios told reporters he had a "great" meeting with Yin on the G20 sidelines. Bessent said he had "limited" exchanges on AI with Chinese officials at the G20 finance meeting. [1] A sideline chat is not a mid-September dialogue.
In June Trump signed an AI executive order setting up a voluntary framework for pre-release cybersecurity reviews of frontier models. The United States has not released the criteria. [1] That is the same unpublished window Altman sat in for Astra. Former Microsoft executive Craig Mundie has been sounding out Chinese counterparts on U.S. proposals, one source said, as co-chair of an unofficial Track II channel. [1] Both sides also discussed guardrails at a Track 1.5 dialogue in Beijing last week, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wrote on social media, Reuters said. [1] No independent /status/ URL for that post was recovered. The attribution stays in Reuters.
Paul Triolo of DGA-Albright Stonebridge called the moment "now or never." [1] Scott Singer of Carnegie said China has expressed concern about whether the United States has sufficient regulation of the most advanced models, and that both sides want to manage a cross-border crisis. [1] Samm Sacks of New America said opening a channel to share observations and jointly monitor incidents would be a starting point, because "frontier agents can cause massive damage when unmonitored." [1] Those are quotes. They are not a schedule. Low that a meeting exists until a public calendar. The leak and the denial are Friday's copy.
-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing