The United States and China have agreed a new dialogue on superintelligence, the term the Trump administration uses for the most advanced artificial intelligence, in an attempt to manage shared risks while the two countries keep competing for AI supremacy.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the mechanism on 10 November in prepared remarks to the National Committee on US-China Relations in New York. He said the dialogue was meant to guard against shared risks and to prevent a misunderstanding between the two systems.

Testing standards and an incident alert channel

Under the arrangement, the two sides expect to exchange best practices for evaluating and testing advanced models before they are released, and for keeping human judgment firmly in command of the technology. They have also agreed a direct channel for alerting each other to serious incidents involving superintelligence models.

Bessent said the alert system had been agreed by President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping at their meeting at the White House in September. The dialogue will be advanced in Shenzhen on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders' summit on 18-19 November, alongside the third Trump-Xi meeting of 2026, following summits in Beijing in May and Washington in September.

No limits on AI development

Bessent was clear that Washington had made no commitment to slow the development of AI, and that the United States would continue to pursue technological supremacy. He said the two countries should harbour no illusions about their differences as they cooperated on risk while competing.

A fourth Trump-Xi meeting is expected in December at the Group of 20 summit in Miami.

Sources: Reuters via SRN News and Silicon Report.