In a Beijing conference room recently, I noted to a counterpart that the United States and the Soviet Union took more than a decade to build toward nuclear coordination after the Cuban Missile Crisis. "That did not end well for the Soviet Union," was the reply. 

As Donald Trump meets Xi Jinping, the headline items are trade, Taiwan, and Iran. Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the agenda, too. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent named two key risks of powerful AI that demand the leaders’ attention: weaponization and runaway AI. 

I met with Chinese Communist Party advisers, AI lab directors, and national security strategists about these very risks. I learned that President Trump's approach to AI and China is working. Every Chinese counterpart I met named the U.S. policy stack. Pax Silica. The Genesis Mission. The White House directive on adversarial distillation. They named legislation by sponsor. The complaints arrived in the same order – export controls, remote compute access restrictions, entity listings – before pivoting to a new request: shift the conversation from competition to managed risk. 

Anthropic's limited release of Mythos in April made the stakes real. A model that can find unpatched vulnerabilities........

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