Barely 10 days after using the Delhi BRICS summit to offer a Chinese vision of international cooperation on artificial intelligence, President Xi Jinping will sit down with US President Donald Trump in Washington on Thursday to initiate a formal bilateral dialogue on AI and its risks. Xi’s journey from Delhi to Washington underlines an uncomfortable reality: The BRICS rhetoric on AI may be multipolar, but technological power at the frontier remains concentrated in the United States and China.

As Trump personally receives Xi upon his arrival in Washington and rolls out the red carpet, trade balances and export controls are expected to figure prominently in their third summit in less than 10 months. But AI is now set to become an integral part of the engagement between the world’s two most important powers. The launch of a US-China AI dialogue could be a modest step towards managing the growing risks that AI poses to international security.

The Washington dialogue marks the flip side of the happy talk on AI at BRICS. In Delhi, Xi emphasised openness, access and diffusion. He invited BRICS members to join the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation, launched by China in Shanghai this summer, and proposed an open-source AI community for the forum. Xi presented China as the champion of developing countries seeking affordable access to AI models and applications.

In Washington, the conversation will be about the other side of the AI revolution — the dangers generated by increasingly powerful frontier models and the need to prevent accidents,........

© Indian Express