The latest US-China summit covered a wide range of topics including artificial intelligence (AI). However, the official readouts from both countries did not touch upon an issue that has generated heated debate: whether the United States and China should agree to pause or slow down the development of frontier AI.
That absence has triggered considerable discussion. During my recent visit to New York, many US friends asked whether Beijing would ever agree to some form of arrangement. Before predicting whether China would say yes or no, we need to unpack several other questions first.
The first question we need to clarify is who we are talking about when we ask, “What does China think?” If you ask people in China’s AI safety community, I expect many of them to be seriously concerned about frontier risks and already working on these questions. We can see this from the AI Safety Governance Framework 3.0 recently published by the National Technical Committee 260 on Cybersecurity of the Standardisation Administration of China.
