On September 4, 2026, Reuters reported that the US and China are preparing for their first official bilateral talks focused exclusively on AI safety, tentatively planned for mid-September. Washington wants the US-China talks to address AI-directed cyberattacks and has proposed cooperation between US and Chinese AI laboratories to monitor and share information about such threats. The proposed dialogue comes days after cybersecurity researchers and OpenAI reported that 700 rogue AI agents had attacked the AI startup Hugging Face in July and attempted to conceal it.

Both states hold data centres and headquarters for OpenAI and Anthropic. These developments point to a problem neither Washington nor Beijing can address through technological competition alone. Now, AI is moving from a tool used by cyber operators to a potential actor capable of carrying out complex operations with limited human interference. In current times, the US and China are competing extensively for leadership in advanced AI. The danger is therefore not simply that AI will make cyberattacks more powerful, but also that the strategic competition could encourage both powers to develop offensive AI capabilities faster than they develop mechanisms to control them.

The upcoming dialogue consequently presents a narrow but crucial opportunity. Washington and Beijing do not need to resolve their broader technical rivalry. They need to prevent that rivalry from producing a cybersecurity dilemma in which increasingly autonomous systems, uncertain attributions, and compressed decision-making make escalations harder to control.

If AI systems start launching cyberattacks with less human intervention, it may become difficult to know who launched the attack, which leads governments to........

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