Trump and Xi Won’t Find Common Ground on AI Safety

Filed 47m ago · Via Foreign Policy · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Bumbly March

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Scanned and uploaded by Renessaince · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Trump and Xi are set to meet in Washington on September 24, with AI safety expected on the agenda, but analysts see little chance the two governments align on what the risk even is. U.S. tech elites fixate on speculative superintelligence scenarios, while Chinese officials, working from a cybernetics tradition, focus on technical failures and economic fallout like youth unemployment.

China has reportedly threatened to cancel the summit over prospective U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, though that is described as routine diplomatic friction rather than a real deal-breaker. A deeper obstacle is regulatory mismatch: Beijing can rewrite tech rules by fiat, while U.S. regulation faces lobbying, litigation, and a divided Congress, a gap Chinese officials may read as American bad faith rather than structural reality.

Trump himself has publicly rejected the premise of AI guardrails, posting that the only control AI needs is a 'STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,' and has pushed a narrative blaming China for domestic opposition to data centers.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A president who thinks his own IQ is the guardrail system is not walking into a safety summit, he is walking into a photo opportunity. Beijing controls its tech companies the way a rancher controls his fence line, total and immediate, while Washington's approach amounts to strongly worded suggestions that lobbyists then argue down in court. Two sides that disagree about what the danger even is were never going to leave that room with a shared rulebook, no matter how high anybody's IQ gets billed as.

Source: Read the original at Foreign Policy → Scored: Bumbly March · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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