A roadmap for a US-China AI dialogue
A new essay with Ryan Hass published by the Brookings Institution
Greetings from a sub-freezing Beijing, where I am on a short trip to participate in a series of exchanges with Chinese scholars and practitioners on digital policy, artificial intelligence, and US-China relations.
I’m writing to share my latest piece, coauthored with Brookings Institution China Center Director Ryan Hass, in which we take stock of an opportunity for productive bilateral problem-solving in technology policy and bilateral strategic stability now before the US and Chinese governments, namely the government-level talks on AI issues announced at the Biden-Xi meeting in California in November.
During this trip and my two other visits to China since last summer, and over roughly six years of studying Chinese AI policy discourse through research and discussions with Chinese counterparts, I have observed that US-China discussions about “AI” can be sprawling and unfocused—because the concepts are capacious and some terms of discussion are not understood the same by relevant actors.
This means a government-to-government discussion is an opportunity to capture important topics but also could be squandered if focus is not found. In brief, we argue the two governments should rapidly move to narrow their efforts on a few specific areas where common risks or benefits can be addressed, setting aside issues that are ill-defined or dominated by irreconcilable differences. Doing so could produce concrete results and set a tone for future productive efforts in a field peppered with discord.
Read the article here. The first three paragraphs are included below.
A roadmap for a US-China AI dialogue
By Graham Webster and Ryan Hass
When President Joe Biden and General Secretary Xi Jinping met in California in November 2023, their governments announced a new bilateral channel for consultation on artificial intelligence (AI). If both governments scope this effort wisely and focus on several concrete, tractable issues, they may have an opportunity to make lasting progress in reducing risks and building consensus around the governance of emerging technologies. If they fail to coalesce around common objectives, though, they risk creating another forum for ritual airing of grievances. This window of opportunity may be fleeting, so they must use it purposively.
What makes it so challenging for the two governments to, as Biden put it, “get our experts together to discuss risk and safety issues associated with artificial intelligence” is that the specific problem at hand is not widely agreed on between or even within the two countries. Indeed, while the White House readout said Biden and Xi “affirmed the need to address the risks of advanced AI systems and improve AI safety through U.S.-China government talks,” China’s official Xinhua News Agency was more circumspect, writingthat “establishing a dialogue between governments on artificial intelligence” was one area in which the two leaders agreed to enhance cooperation.
Scoping an AI dialogue is difficult because, in many U.S.-China engagements on the topic, “AI” does not mean anything specific. It means everything from self-driving cars and autonomous weapons to facial recognition, face-swapping apps, ChatGPT, and a potential robot apocalypse. What’s at issue in this dialogue, then, depends on which present and future technologies and applications are on the agenda. AI might remain an umbrella term, but to make progress, officials will need to select specific topics and problems where the United States and China could reduce risk and capture benefits while setting aside intractable issues and nebulous concerns.
I am grateful to Ryan for his insights and collaboration on this piece, as well as for giving it a home at Brookings. I’m also grateful to the National Committee on US-China Relations, which organizes an ongoing Track 2 dialogue on digital economy that brought me to China last month; the University of Pennsylvania Project on the Future of U.S.–China Relations, which was the impetus for the present trip; and everyone in the United States, China, and elsewhere who has taken the time to speak with me and my colleagues on these issues in recent years.
We welcome your thoughts. For now, happy 2024 and all the best for the Year of the Dragon.
About Here It Comes
Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a research scholar and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology in China, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.