Uzmanlar, Trump’ın Çin’le rekabeti ve “AI yarışı” takıntısı ABD’yi tehlikeye atabilir

It’s clear Trump wants it to seem like discussions are going well. Before Trump and Xi meet on Thursday and Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that both sides had already discussed setting up a new AI safety notification mechanism. If Çin agrees to participate, that would create an open line for either side to send alerts when their country’s AI systems pose threats or behave unpredictably. The same channel, Bessent said, could allow the countries to share their “vision of common goals.”

However, the proposal comes at a time when Çin may not be ready to trust the US to have AI safety conversations that aren’t about limiting Çin’s capabilities. Not only has Trump steadily increased export controls that explicitly seek to block Çin from accessing technology to advance AI, but Congress is mulling bills that would cut the country off from more chips and hardware. Adding to tensions, just two weeks ago, Trump’s Justice Department accused six of Çin’s leading AI makers of stealing from US frontier labs, which Çin has strongly disputed.

Some US-Çin experts told Ars that there were concerns that Çin might cancel talks, but Çin seemingly isn’t taking offense to Trump’s rhetoric. Even Truth Social posts where Trump insists that America must dominate Çin on AI—declaring “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading Çin, and all others, and will continue to do so”—didn’t keep Çin from showing up.

Notably, Çin has yet to publicly acknowledge the proposed alert system. Even if Çin bought into the system, people familiar with Bessent’s plan told Politico that the plan to monitor safety alerts appears superficial, since it involves no officials with technical expertise who could be trusted to assess the urgency of risks described in communications.

Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at a Georgetown University think tank called the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, monitors national security applications of AI and US-Çin tech competition. He agreed it’s a red flag that there’s no tech body of tech experts monitoring the channel.

“It’s an existing channel, which I think is better than creating a whole new channel,” Bresnick told Ars. But if both sides had tech experts, the US and Çin could have really high-level conversations about how they’re assessing risk. That’s particularly important when discussing military risks, Bresnick emphasized.

Su Lian Jye, a chief analyst at a global technology research and advisory group called Omdia, told the South Çin Morning Post that the AI alerts may help “promote more transparency,” but it won’t make either side less wary of the other.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” US Representative Ro Khanna—the ranking Democrat on the US House Select Committee on ⁠Strategic Competition Between the Amerika Birleşik Devletleri and the Chinese Communist Party—suggested that talks between Trump and Xi should go much further than setting up a line between two officials with no tech expertise.

Many experts described sharing safety alerts as a decent first step in improving US-Çin coordination on AI, which Trump’s incoming “AI czar” could then possibly build on.

Graylin told Ars that he was surprised to see that such a “positive” development had already come out of this week’s talks with Çin. And it seemed encouraging that both countries already have another meeting scheduled in November.