AI Threats Are Expected To Figure in Prep Talks for Trump-Xi Summit

Risks posed by rogue AI agents and bad actors using the technology are expected to be discussed in talks Sunday at New York, where Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and China’s vice premier, He Lifeng, are meeting ahead of this week’s White House summit between Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping.Both leaders have thrown cold water on suggestions from CEOs of the largest artificial intelligence companies that development of the technology needs to slow down, but reports that many of those same tech titans are invited to a state dinner during the summit have prompted speculation there could be movement on the issue. Messrs. Trump and Xi have cited the race between their countries for AI supremacy as a reason to resist any slowdown, suggesting that any slowdown would have to result from a mutual agreement.“The United States remains the leader in AI. And we are open to discussions on avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems,” Mr. Bessent said in a statement to Axios ahead of his talks with Mr. He. “We expect our discussions to cover both open and closed weight models.”Among the areas that have been identified for possible progress is a 2024 agreement between the United States and China holding that any decision to use nuclear weapons must always be made by a human, not by AI.That agreement, concluded in the final weeks of the Biden administration, remains informal and has never been ratified in a formal text. However it has acquired new relevance with Friday‘s disclosure that a mistaken AI report in May led American forces to believe a Chinese ship was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program to the Middle East.Military planes were already in the air preparatory to an interception of the ship before the error was discovered, CNN said. “Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations,” the network added.Public anxiety about AI has been rising following a series of reports about AI agents — that is, software programs capable of making their own decisions — breaking out of their testing environments and hacking into the websites of real-world companies.In one of the most widely reported examples, an AI agent created by OpenAI acted on its own to recruit other AI agents and, by sharing information on message boards, successfully hacked into the production infrastructure of the AI startup Hugging Face.Just on Friday, Google reported that its Gemini model gained access to the internet in May and broke into three websites after guessing at passwords. “These events highlight the importance of training powerful AI models to act responsibly,” Google’s vice president of security engineering, Heather Adkins, said in a statement. Within the industry, calls for a slowdown began with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who last month urged both governments and private firms to ease the pace of development and suggested the government might embed “external evaluators” within the AI companies to assess risks. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI/Tesla, among others, endorsed the call.Mr. Trump quickly rejected the idea, writing on Truth Social that “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”Beijing, meanwhile, dismissed the idea in the Communist Party-run Global Times as part of a “Cold War playbook” targeting China. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said any attempt to slow down China’s AI development “will only disrupt the process of global governance of artificial intelligence and is not in the interests of any party.”Nevertheless, Messrs. Altman and Musk are expected to attend the state dinner, as is Mr. Trump’s influential adviser on AI development, David Sacks, suggesting that the issue will be an inescapable part of the summit proceedings.

AI Threats Are Expected To Figure in Prep Talks for Trump-Xi Summit

AI Threats Are Expected To Figure in Prep Talks for Trump-Xi Summit

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