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The Story: Last year at the APEC summit in San Francisco, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping agreed to establish a bilateral channel for AI consultation. However, that channel getting any use faces a significant challenge: the U.S. and China hold divergent views on AI. This discrepancy could grow or shrink as both nations vie for supremacy in AI across various sectors, raising the stakes for them to reach consensus on AI safety.

While China and the US have so far shared very little communication about their approaches to AI guardrails, those talks may be coming soon. There are reports that Biden and Xi Jinping are considering engaging in a telephone discussion this spring.

If that conversation does happen, the expected talking points will focus on managing the risks of AI, including its role in facilitating cyberattacks and the development of advanced bioweapons.

Expert Take: Derek Xiao, investor at Menlo Ventures, is in favor of cooperation between the US and China to establish some basic guardrails for AI: “Fundamentally, I feel like it benefits everyone to have cooperation over alignment with what safe, effective, trustworthy AI looks like.”

Xiao believes the US and China agree on some basic safety principles, and he recommends starting with this common ground. The starting place is, “pre-deployment testing of generative AI systems and funding research for better evaluations and interpretability.” Xiao believes these are the “first things we should tackle,” and says he is “hopeful” the two nations will reach cooperation in the near future.

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