Trans-Pacific View | Security | East Asia

What a China-US AI Safety Channel Needs

Trump and Xi agreed to set up a China-U.S. AI incident reporting channel. But AI companies in both countries don’t currently provide the necessary information. 

U.S. President Trump delivers remarks to the press ahead of a summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House, Sep. 24, 2026.

The most concrete outcome from last month’s summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping was an apparent agreement to set up a China-U.S. AI incident reporting channel. But even if either government proves willing to use this direct line or start sending data across the Pacific, they must first address a more pressing issue: U.S. and Chinese frontier AI companies currently do not provide the information they would need.

In the U.S., no federal statute or regulation specifically requires AI companies to report safety incidents and dangerous capabilities to the government. Although some states have passed incident reporting laws, federal legislation – such as the AI Incident Reporting Act and the FRONTIER Act – has stalled in Congress. The industry is still largely regulating itself.

Moreover, while the White House Accord on Super Intelligence pledges to identify and remedy safety issues, it does not mandate notification to regulators or set reporting deadlines. The Trump administration’s separate Super Intelligence Force is developing government reporting mechanisms for breaches, hacks, and other AI incidents. But it is not a regulator, and its recommendations would need to be implemented through enforceable measures.

There is also a severe lack of funding for federal government testing and oversight. According to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index Report, U.S. developers last year released 59 notable AI models, while British developers released just one. Yet the main U.S. federal AI-testing agency, the Commerce Department’s Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI), has an annual budget of only $15 million, whereas the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute (AISI) has a budget of almost $90 million.

Given that the White House Accord seems to envision frontier labs doing the bulk of safety testing themselves, it remains to be seen what role the government would play in validating such testing, and whether any government body would have access to sufficient compute to conduct its own testing.

Unlike the United States, China’s government doesn’t face political bottlenecks, and it has already built a significant regulatory structure, with the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) recently calling for behavioral controls, model traceability, security testing, and safeguards against system vulnerabilities and loss of control. But there is still no Chinese equivalent to CAISSI – a specialized, centralized AI-safety body with a mandate. The government has plenty of authority over tech companies, but oversight is dispersed across the CAC, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the Ministry of Science and Technology, and other agencies.

Evaluating the risk of frontier AI models requires technical expertise and coordination among all the relevant Chinese government departments, including the security services. But some Chinese government agencies lack sufficient technical capacity, and many of the people with the deepest technical expertise sit in........

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