// WIRED US/UK — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
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.
But with the US expected to extend a trade truce and Trump reluctant to stop exports of cutting-edge Nvidia chips to China, developing a framework that has enforcement measures with teeth could take time to get White House approval, sources say.
The administration has granted a limited number of licenses this year for Nvidia to sell its H200 chip to China, a critical component for AI labs to increase compute power to train their models. Nvidia’s supporters have argued that not selling the chips incentivizes Chinese companies like Huawei to develop their own chip technology, though according to recent reports, the company has already achieved that milestone with its commercially available AI chips.
Some Trump officials have also suggested the notification system may also be delayed while Trump decides on who to appoint as his next "AI czar” to lead a so-called "AI Force," which is being envisioned as a role in charge of interagency coordination.