A US-China AI Hotline Won't Be Ready For a While

As US president Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping prepare to meet in Washington for a state dinner at the White House on Thursday, AI has become a top priority. Tech executives from OpenAI and Nvidia have confirmed their attendance at the dinner, as a number of key agenda items are on the table.

Chief among them is a US proposal to establish an AI notification system with China, akin to the Cold War hotline with Moscow, which would allow each country to alert the other about national security issues related to AI. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent first announced the notification system on Sunday with Chinese vice premier He Lifeng.

But for all the high-level progress, Trump administration officials tell Inner Loop they expect it to still take a number of weeks to finalize an agreement, even if they are optimistic that the hotline could be in place before the year’s end.

There are several parts that need to be formalized in more detail, including establishing benchmarks on what kind of incident rises to the level of a national security issue, which remains unclear, as well as explicit sign-on from China, which has been noncommittal.

Trump officials tell Inner Loop they are essentially targeting a framework for the system to be functional—and, crucially, agreed to by Trump—by the time Bessent next meets with Lifeng in follow-up talks in two months' time in Shenzhen, China.

The discussions around such a mechanism underscore the growing concern around the rapidly developing capabilities of frontier AI models as the US and China race to become the dominant power in the industry.

Trump officials have internally discussed putting together a framework that lays out criteria for when each country is obligated to alert the other and enforcement measures to ensure it doesn't only become the US alerting the Chinese.

This is an edition of Hugo Lowell’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.