Can the world’s two most powerful leaders find common ground on AI?

September 17, 2026 — 5:00am

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Beijing: When Donald Trump and Xi Jinping sit down at the White House next week, it will be against the backdrop of swirling calls from leading US artificial intelligence pioneers to “pace the frontier”.

That is, to slow down the freight train of frontier AI model development which some creators are warning is careening at such speed that is risks derailing and ploughing into humanity itself.

When it comes to the AI race, it’s a two-state sprint between the US and China. The rest of the world is largely resigned to watching from the sidelines and hoping these two powers get it right.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman – one of the new-age tech kings whose company developed ChatGPT – has suggested a Nobel Peace Prize could be in the offing if Trump and Xi strike an agreement on a safety pact setting some baseline standards for the AI race.

“I don’t think this is hard. This is like a one-page document,” he said recently.

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Many China watchers agree that Beijing doesn’t see AI as an existential threat to humanity in the same terms as some in Silicon Valley, but it is increasingly concerned about the risks it poses for regime security for the Chinese Communist Party.

That view was distilled this week by China’s top spy chief, Chen Yixin, who published an article detailing risks including large-scale espionage, deepfakes, and attacks on........

© The Age