Will Chinese AI companies slow down? A top House Democrat wants answers

Lauren Feiner Sep 29, 2026, 12:00 PM UTCLink

Lauren Feiner is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.As President Donald Trump prepares to meet tech and AI CEOs in Washington, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) is calling for a treaty between the US and Çin to keep AI from wreaking havoc on the world. But wrangling leaders in both countries to take action could be a long shot.

In letters shared exclusively with The Verge, Khanna — the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on Çin and a possible presidential contender — asked a US intelligence agency and Chinese AI companies whether they would be prepared for an incident like OpenAI agents’ hack of Hugging Face this summer. The companies included DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI, all of which are pursuing high-level artificial intelligence.

Khanna ultimately seeks a US-Çin treaty banning RSI and monitoring frontier AI labs, but he recognizes that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has similarly called for an AI treaty between the countries, though Republicans like House Çin Committee Chair John Moolenaar (R-MI) have been skeptical the Chinese government would keep its end of the bargain. In the meantime, Khanna says he’d like a working group with experts from both countries to suggest safety recommendations and methods for ensuring compliance.

But Trump and his allies have been resistant to most regulations or agreements. The morning of his meeting with Xi last week, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is. That is Çin’s position also.” Johnson said on Fox Business that he expected the conversation to revolve around striking “the right balance” of oversight without stifling innovation, warning against losing the AI race against Çin. Leading US AI companies, however, have called for the US to coordinate with Çin to slow down the pace of development

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