Xi Jinping

The heads of several major AI firms told the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) their industry urgently needed global oversight to avoid dangers that could threaten the whole world.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of Anthropic, told members of the body on Wednesday.

Sam Altman, the head of rival company OpenAI, echoed his concerns, telling the 15-member council tasked with tackling major crises globally that humanity could “lose control of the future of AI”.

The meeting, which coincides with the UN General Assembly (UNGA) gathering in New York City, was convened by France and comes at a time when experts are increasingly warning that the rapid development of AI needs more human oversight to ensure it does not slip out of control and cause a global catastrophe.

Altman and Amodei called on world leaders to take action.

“If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone,” Altman told members. “They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people they serve.”

Their concerns were shared by several representatives on the council, including the foreign ministers of France and the United Kingdom, who said the international community needed to step in and create common frameworks for how the technology should be controlled.

Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue, whose company has come under attack by out-of-control AI models in recent months – incidents used by the other companies as evidence of the need for more safety measures – told the UNSC his company had relied on the technology to defend itself in those same incidents.

Delangue said Hugging Face had relied on a Chinese AI model to help defend against the attack by OpenAI’s AI agents, because it faced fewer restrictions than comparable US tools.

“We were attacked by AI, but more importantly, we defended ourselves with AI,” he told the council.

US and China reluctant to impose restrictions

In the United States, though, where the largest and most influential companies developing AI are based, the administration of US President Donald Trump has baulked at imposing new guardrails on the industry.

The administration’s representative at the UNSC meeting, Michael Kratsios, told members, “We totally reject all efforts by international bodies to assert centralised control and global governance of AI.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to discuss whether and how to regulate AI during a visit to Washington, DC, this week. The two countries are locked in a technological race to develop more powerful AI tools, a competition that experts say makes it less likely that either country would want to impose any major new restrictions on their efforts right away.

Yet there is a growing recognition at the UN of the danger AI potentially poses to the world, said Daniel Forti, head of UN Affairs at the International Crisis Group. Member states understand that “there will be much more of a need for international cooperation, setting some rules of AI, even if the biggest players are more focused on growth opportunities than on some sort of collaboration,” Forti said.

For several years, the UN has been participating in multilateral meetings to shape everything from protections for workers from AI in emerging economies and ensuring open access to this technology, to following how AI is used in military conflicts. In 2024, the UNGA unanimously passed its first resolution on AI, a nonbinding statement that called on member states to protect personal data, monitor AI for risks and safeguard human rights.

The adoption of AI has taken off dramatically since then, and with it have come dire warnings from environmental groups, human rights advocates, and even the tech moguls whose companies are developing the tech.

The future of AI “cannot be decided by a handful of countries or left to the whims of a few billionaires”, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at a global summit held earlier this year.

Last year, the UNGA formed two new bodies to deal with AI: the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI that brings together experts to provide governments with independent assessments, and the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which provides a regular forum for discussing approaches to AI governance.

“The dangers are real and imminent,” Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian expert on AI and co-chair of the Independent International Scientific Panel, told the UNSC on Wednesday. “This council faces an unprecedented threat, one that none of its members would ⁠choose, that none can contain alone, and that does not respect the borders we defend.”

Trump takes rare step of meeting foreign leader at the airport, underscoring significance of US-China relationship.

United States President Donald Trump has welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping as he arrived in the US for a three-day trip focused on issues such as security, trade and technology.

Trump took the rare step of meeting the Chinese leader in person at Joint Base Andrews in the state of Maryland on Wednesday, the first president to do so in recent memory.

The US president and First Lady Melania Trump greeted Xi and his wife on the tarmac during a welcoming ceremony, where a red carpet was rolled out and the couples exchanged handshakes. Trump and Xi then walked side by side, flanked by US soldiers, before standing for a gunfire salute and the US national anthem.

The in-person greeting is a sign of the significance that Washington ascribes to its relationship with Beijing, whose meteoric economic rise over the last several decades has transformed it into a global superpower capable of rivalling the United States.

Despite tense relations that worsened after the Trump administration placed high tariffs on Chinese goods – a move that was met with retaliatory measures from Beijing – Trump has expressed personal affinity for Xi and his desire for strong ties with China.

The Chinese president’s trip to the US will include a state dinner, attended by leaders of the country’s powerful tech industry, a military ceremony at the White House, and a visit to the National Archives, home to documents of historical and cultural significance such as the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

But both countries remain wary of the other as they compete for political and economic influence. The trip is likely to include discussion of issues such as the US war on Iran, trade, technology, rare-earth minerals and US ties to Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims as part of its territory.

An 11-month deal that offered temporary relief from punishing tariffs between the two countries is set to expire on November 10.

Scott Bessent and He Lifeng meet in New York for US-China talks ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting later this week.

Top economic officials from China and the United States have begun talks in New York City aimed at clearing the way for possible agreements on trade, artificial intelligence and critical minerals ahead of a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng began talks at JPMorgan Chase’s Manhattan headquarters on Sunday morning, with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer also taking part.

The talks come four days before Trump is due to host Xi at the White House, with both sides looking to ease tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

“I’m looking forward to having focused, fulsome and constructive talks today that will set the stage for our leaders’ meeting,” Bessent told reporters as he arrived.

At the top of the agenda is a fragile US-China trade truce due to expire on November 10.

The agreement, reached in Busan, South Korea, last November, capped US tariffs on Chinese goods at about 20 percent after a tit-for-tat trade fight briefly pushed tariffs into the triple digits.

Washington is also pressuring Beijing over its supply of rare-earth magnets and other critical minerals, crucial to industries ranging from cars to advanced semiconductors.

China promised to restore the flow of critical minerals under last year’s truce, but a senior US official said on Friday that Beijing’s performance had “not been up to par”.

AI enters the talks

Artificial intelligence (AI) is also expected to feature prominently, adding a relatively new issue to negotiations long dominated by trade.

Bessent has said the countries could discuss AI “guardrails” aimed at addressing shared risks, including preventing powerful models from falling into the hands of malign non-state actors.

The talks are expected to cover both open- and closed-weight AI models. Chinese open-weight models have increasingly attracted US companies, in part because they can be cheaper than closed systems developed by US firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

“The United States remains the leader in AI,” Bessent said. “And we are open to discussions on avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems.”

Another potential point of friction is Iran. China remains one of Tehran’s most important economic partners and buys much of its oil, making Beijing an important target of Washington’s efforts to increase economic pressure on Iran as the US-Israel war on Iran enters its seventh month.

Expectations remain low

Despite the packed agenda, analysts are not expecting a sweeping breakthrough.

“I think there will be some show of deliverables because of the fact that it’s a presidential summit coming, but I don’t feel like we’re on the verge of some sort of breakthrough,” Anna Ashton, a China trade analyst and founder of Ashton Intelligence, told Reuters.

“I think status quo is probably both sides’ general best expectation.”

Former US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell similarly said the immediate goal may simply be keeping tensions contained.

“One of the only things we can hope for in the short term is a truce, and that this will likely continue through the remainder of this year,” Campbell said.

Sunday’s negotiations are part of a series of meetings between Bessent, He and Greer over the past 16 months aimed at hammering out areas of agreement before Trump and Xi meet face to face.

WASHINGTON, United States: The US military honor guard has been rehearsing and the new White House helipad is ready. But will Xi Jinping and Donald Trump achieve lift-off at their summit next week?

Warnings of an AI apocalypse hang heavy over the Chinese president’s first talks at the White House with his US counterpart, with both countries racing for supremacy in this technology.

Trump’s Iran war casts a long shadow too, as China seeks to avoid US sanctions against countries dealing with Tehran, despite reports that Beijing supplied Tehran with intelligence for a strike on US troops.

A trade war is of even greater concern and the world’s two largest economies are still seeking to mitigate the fallout from Trump’s global tariffs. The threat of war over Taiwan looms large as well.

Behind it all is desire to manage tensions between a superpower keen to keep its place at the top and a rapidly rising rival determined to make the 21st century a Chinese one.

“I’ll be discussing almost everything with him,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, ahead of their meeting on September 24.

‘Don’t expect much’

But the two leaders are more likely to simply extend a relative truce rather than produce any concrete results, like when Xi hosted Trump in Beijing four months ago, experts said.

“I don’t expect much to come out of this,” Jonathan Czin of the Brookings Institution told AFP.

“In many ways, this is going to be a recapitulation of Trump’s visit to Beijing back in May, where the focus was really on the ostensible rapport between the two leaders.”

With fears about AI making global headlines, agreement to cooperate on regulation or a slowdown is expected to be a major topic of discussion between Trump and Xi.

But any major deals are “politically out of reach for now,” said Wang Dong, a professor at Peking University, as Beijing and Washington both fear losing out in the race for AI dominance.

Tensions over Iran will also come up. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is due to meet his Chinese counterpart He Lifeng this weekend for pre-summit talks including on Iran sanctions.

Trump has, however, played down reports that Chinese entities supplied Iran with satellite imagery for an attack on a US military base in Jordan, saying Xi had “behaved reasonably well” and that “we spy on them, too.”

On trade, there is “room for progress on tariffs, agricultural purchases and selected export controls,” Yue Su of The Economist Intelligence Unit told AFP.

‘Spectacle’

Yet Trump has, as so often before, appeared more interested in the optics of his meeting with a powerful foreign leader than with the substance.

“This is less a summit and more a spectacle. This is designed for deep public consumption,” said Kurt Campbell, former US Deputy Secretary of State and now Chairman of The Asia Group.

Trump pushed for a new granite helicopter landing pad on the White House South Lawn to be open in time for Xi’s visit, which will include a grand state dinner.

Troops in flashy uniforms have been rehearsing on the White House driveway this week ahead of the welcome ceremony.

Trump’s only disappointment is that his under-construction $400 million ballroom won’t be ready — though he has said that when finished it will “top” Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, where Xi hosted him in May.

During the Beijing trip Trump showered praise on Xi, only for the Chinese leader to warn about possible “conflict” over Taiwan.

Fears of a possible Chinese invasion of the self-governing island and global semiconductor hub — which Beijing claims as its territory — remain the most sensitive topic between Washington and Beijing, said Peking University’s Wang.

One possible concrete deliverable is an announcement of further summits.

Trump and Xi are expected to meet in November at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Shenzen, China. The Kremlin has suggested a three-way meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump is meanwhile expected to invite Xi to the G20 summit in December at his Doral resort in Miami.