• US, China plan first dedicated AI safety talks of Trump's second term
     
  • Washington wants joint monitoring of AI-driven cyberattacks, sources say
     
  • China sees AI dialogue as key deliverable for September 24 leaders' summit
     
  • Autonomous AI agent incidents add urgency to superpowers' talks
     

BEIJING, Sept 4 (Reuters) - The U.S. and China are gearing up to discuss AI safety risks during a dialogue planned for mid-September, two sources briefed on the discussions told Reuters, as rapidly advancing frontier AI capabilities reach a global tipping point.

The talks, the first official bilateral discussions devoted exclusively to AI between the U.S. and China since U.S. President Donald Trump took office for a second time, will be led by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on the U.S. side, the sources, who were briefed on the planning, said on condition of anonymity.

Reuters is reporting the tentative mid-September period for the first time. Trump and China's President Xi Jinping are due to meet on September 24 during a summit in Washington.

The U.S. wants to discuss cooperation on monitoring AI-directed cyberattacks, and has floated a proposal to ask U.S. and Chinese AI labs to "police themselves" and share information to prevent AI-linked cyberattacks, one of the sources said on condition of anonymity.

Nearly 700 rogue AI agents built on OpenAI models hacked AI startup Hugging Face in July and attempted to cover their tracks by forging logs, OpenAI and cybersecurity researchers said last week, underscoring the risks of coordinated agent swarms acting autonomously for months undetected by humans.

A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, Reuters exclusively reported on Friday.