US and China Agree Super Intelligence Dialogue and Incident Channel

The White House announced the arrangement in a fact sheet on Xi Jinping's state visit, according to The Next Web. Both leaders agreed to call the technology "super intelligence" rather than artificial intelligence. The two countries will hold a regular U.S.-China Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue to exchange views on risks and benefits related to SI, the fact sheet says, and the next exchange will take place by November 2026.

The fact sheet does not say what would count as an incident. That gap matters because the channel is the operational core of the deal.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent focused on setting up the channel at talks with Chinese officials before the summit, Axios reported. At those talks, the US proposed an alert system for AI incidents that count as national security threats. Not everyone treats the channel as a serious safety tool. Ars Technica reported on 23 September that people familiar with Bessent's plan said the plan to monitor safety alerts appears superficial, since it involves no officials with technical expertise who could be trusted to assess the urgency of risks described in communications. One source mocked the plan, saying "the scientific, technical term is BS." Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told Ars Technica that it is a red flag that no tech body of experts is monitoring the channel. "I think it's better than nothing for sure, but I don't have a lot of confidence that that is going to make a major difference going forward," Bresnick said.

Su Lian Jye, chief analyst at the research and advisory group Omdia, told the South China Morning Post that the AI alerts may help "promote more transparency" but will not make either side less wary. "I don't think the dialog will remove all concerns and differences on distillation, pricing competition, and pacing," he said. Su added that turning the proposal into an effective tool would require both countries to agree on risk classifications, notification triggers, response protocols, and regular review procedures, according to Ars Technica.

Washington's terms, Beijing's silence

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, set limits on what the dialogue can become. "The United States is committed to diplomacy and dialogue on super intelligence. But international dialogue cannot be allowed to drift toward global governance," Kratsios wrote on X, according to The Next Web. He added that the US rejects any attempt to build "a globalist scheme of control" for the technology. The US has also asked the G20 not to govern AI.

China has yet to publicly acknowledge the proposed alert system, Ars Technica reported. The same piece noted that Trump's Justice Department had accused six of China's leading AI makers of stealing from US frontier labs two weeks before the summit, a claim China strongly disputed, and that Congress is weighing bills that would cut China off from more chips and hardware. Even Truth Social posts where Trump insisted America must dominate China on AI did not keep China from showing up to the talks, Ars Technica said.

The trade package attached to the visit is more concrete than the AI language. The two countries agreed on lower tariffs for $30bn of non-sensitive goods in each direction, according to the fact sheet reported by The Next Web. China will import at least 10 million tonnes of US coal in 2027 and again in 2028. Talks on rare earths and other critical minerals are still under way, and Xi ended the visit with the trade truce extended to January.

Talent flows turn Beijing's way

The summit also lands against a shift in where elite AI researchers work. A study by Carnegie China, part of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, found that China has overtaken the United States as the country where the most elite AI researchers work, The Next Web reported on 28 September. In 2025, 41% of the top researchers it tracked worked in China and 34% in the US. Three years earlier the US led: in 2022, 46% worked in the US and 27% in China.

The authors, Damien Ma and Binyi Yang, looked at researchers who had papers accepted at NeurIPS 2025 and traced more than 10,000 of them with full career histories, using data from OpenReview. China is now the largest source of elite AI talent: in 2025, 57% of the group took their first degree in China, up from 46% in 2022. More of them are staying in China to work, a shift the study attributes to job openings in China's AI industry and to tighter US visa rules, especially for Chinese graduate students in science. Peking University and Tsinghua University now rank first and second as workplaces for the researchers, with South Korea's KAIST third; Google held first place in 2022. Europe lost ground, with ETH Zurich and the University of Oxford dropping out of the top rankings.

That talent base is being matched by rules on how it may move. DW reported on 24 September that new entry-exit rules took effect last week, giving Chinese authorities the power to stop engineers, founders and other specialists from leaving the country if their expertise in batteries, rare earths or artificial intelligence is judged a threat to "industrial and technological security." China has also tightened outbound-investment rules, cracked down on Chinese nationals holding wealth offshore and restricted the posting of technical staff overseas.

Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University, told DW the curbs "offer a rare glimpse into the true state of China's economy." He said the measures suggest Beijing is deeply concerned about economic weakness and substantial capital outflows, and is determined to stop "entrepreneurs and skilled personnel from leaving the country." Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for Asia-Pacific at Natixis, told DW that Beijing has not tightened its annual $50,000 foreign-exchange quota but is squeezing the people and agents that money usually travels with. She argued the block on talent will matter more than the squeeze on capital. "You can still move money slowly, with approvals," she said. "You cannot easily replace a process engineer who cannot board a plane."

Policy pushes on batteries and cars

China's industrial policy is moving on the same track. On Monday, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released its battery industry development plan for the fifteenth five-year period, covering 2026 through 2030, CnEVPost reported. The document, dated 14 September, was jointly issued by seven government agencies, including MIIT, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Transport. It aims for initial large-scale use of all-solid-state batteries by 2030, alongside goals for long-life lithium batteries to reach 15,000 charge-discharge cycles and for leading manufacturers to achieve defect rates at the parts-per-billion level. It also calls for improving sodium battery performance and supporting corporate mergers and restructuring.

The plan follows China's release on 11 September of its fifteenth five-year development plan for the intelligent connected NEV industry, which targets a 70% share for NEVs in domestic new passenger vehicle sales by 2030, CnEVPost reported. That earlier plan called for tighter management of power battery production capacity. The battery plan adds priorities for technology development, manufacturing upgrades and broader applications.

Consolidation is already showing up in ownership. GAC Group plans to issue shares to acquire China FAW's 50% stake in FAW Toyota, the company said in a preliminary restructuring plan on Monday, with trading in its A-shares set to resume on 29 September, CnEVPost reported. Shares issued to fund the acquisition would be priced at 5.75 yuan each, though the transaction price and the number of shares have yet to be determined. FAW is expected to become GAC's second-largest shareholder, and GAC's ultimate controller would remain the Guangzhou State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. Combined sales at FAW Toyota and GAC Toyota accounted for 17.03% of China's joint-venture passenger vehicle sales in 2025, according to CAAM data cited in the plan.

Beijing is also trying to export its health tech model. Rest of World reported on 24 September that China now accounts for half of global drug licensing deals, as Western pharmaceutical companies purchase rights to new medicines developed in China. Ruby Wang, a physician and consultant whose book China Cure is due out, told Rest of World that China's advantage came from decades of building capacity through tax incentives, office space and capital investment. She noted that China is strongest in oncology but less mature in immunology, and that Chinese biotech companies remain weak at commercializing. "They know how to build a drug, but they don't know how to sell it," she said.

The gap between Washington's framing and China's rules is where the next phase will be decided. Rest of World argued on 22 September that the US defines the AI race as an anti-China battle over model performance, while China governs AI deployment, with rules on labeling AI-generated content and protections for children and the elderly from anthropomorphic AI manipulation. The same piece cited 87% of Chinese citizens trusting AI against 23% in the US. Whether the new incident channel ever gets technical staff, or remains a line between officials without expertise, is the question the November exchange may answer.