Trump claimed AI agreement with Xi, China says no

Ahead of a summit between the US and China on Thursday, September 25, Donald Trump said that he and China's leader Xi Jinping agreed on how AI should be regulated. Trump said: "I'm going to leave AI exactly the way it is. That's China's position too." He added that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) should serve as the only safeguard against misuse of the technology.

But when Xi Jinping himself spoke after the meeting, it sounded different. He said that the US and China "both have the capacity and the responsibility for the development of AI and for ensuring that the development of AI is always kept under human control." That is more or less the opposite of Trump's wish for minimal regulation.

In other words, there was not the agreement Trump claimed. According to several international media outlets, the summit ended without any agreement to slow down AI development or introduce new common rules. Instead, the two countries are in fierce competition to develop the most advanced AI technology, and neither wants to be bound by international rules that could slow down their own tech companies.

For ordinary Danes, the case means you should not expect a global agreement on safe AI development in the near future. The US and China, the two countries driving most of the world's AI development, fundamentally disagree on how much control there should be over the technology. That leaves a vacuum in which it is largely the big tech companies themselves that set the pace and the framework for how artificial intelligence is developed and used.

The case also shows that you should be careful about taking political statements at face value. Trump's claim of agreement did not hold up when compared directly with what Xi Jinping himself said afterward.