News follow-up · Diplomacy
The US-China talks on AI: what happened since
One meeting in Geneva in May 2024, a leaders' statement on nuclear weapons that November, and then nothing on the public record until September 2026, when the two governments set up a new dialogue under a new name.
What this site reported
On 14 May 2024 the earlier version of this site reported that senior United States and Chinese officials were meeting in Geneva that day for the first government-to-government talks on the risks of artificial intelligence.
What the record shows now
The White House statement of 15 May 2024 confirms the meeting: an interagency United States delegation led by the National Security Council's senior director for technology and national security and the State Department's acting special envoy for critical and emerging technology met a Chinese delegation drawn from six ministries and party bodies on 14 May in Geneva.[1] The statement calls the discussion "candid and constructive", says the two sides exchanged views on their approaches to AI safety and risk management, and records that the United States raised concerns over the misuse of AI, "including by the PRC".[1] It traces the meeting to the November 2023 Woodside summit.[1]
The one concrete outcome came at the leaders' level. The readout of the Biden and Xi meeting in Lima on 16 November 2024 says the two presidents "affirmed the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons", noted that each side had co-sponsored the other's AI resolution at the United Nations General Assembly, and stressed the need to develop military AI "in a prudent and responsible manner".[2] The readout lists AI-related risks among the areas of cooperation since Woodside; it does not announce a second round of the Geneva talks.[2]
This site found no later session of that dialogue on whitehouse.gov or in the archived Biden administration releases. The next document that bears on it is dated 25 September 2026. The White House fact sheet on President Xi's state visit to Washington says the two leaders "agreed to use the term 'super intelligence' rather than 'artificial intelligence'" for the technologies in question, that the two countries "established the U.S.-China Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue to exchange views on risks and benefits related to SI", that the next exchange "will occur by November 2026", and that the two sides also agreed to set up a bilateral communication channel for SI incidents.[3]
Four days later, on 29 September 2026, Executive Order 14434 made the renaming federal policy: executive departments and agencies are to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in place of "Artificial Intelligence" and "AI" in official correspondence, public communications, websites and reports, with earlier regulations, contracts and historical documents left as they are.[4] The order keeps the legal definition of the term at 15 U.S.C. 9401(3) and asks the President's science adviser for proposed legislative language within 60 days.[4]
What it means for public bodies
For agencies the practical change is the vocabulary: official documents issued after 29 September 2026 use "SI" where they used "AI", and the federal AI use case inventories this site counts were compiled under the older name.[4] For the two-country dialogue itself, the record so far is one meeting in 2024, one leaders' statement, and a new channel whose first exchange was due by November 2026.[1][2][3] This page will be updated when a readout of that exchange is published.
See also: AI in the public sector for the executive orders that govern federal use.
Sources
- The White House (Biden administration archive), Statement from NSC Spokesperson Adrienne Watson on the U.S.-PRC Talks on AI Risk and Safety, 15 May 2024. Read 29 October 2026.
- The White House (Biden administration archive), Readout of President Joe Biden's Meeting with President Xi Jinping of the People's Republic of China, Lima, 16 November 2024. Read 29 October 2026.
- The White House, Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Advances a Fair and Reciprocal Relationship with China While Hosting Historic State Visit, 25 September 2026. Read 29 October 2026.
- Federal Register (govinfo), Executive Order 14434, Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence, signed 29 September 2026, published 2 October 2026. Read 29 October 2026.
How this page was checked: the three White House documents and the executive order were read in full on 29 October 2026; the statement that no later session of the 2024 dialogue is on the record rests on those four documents and on a search of the archived Biden administration releases, not on news reports.