Why A US-China AI Regulation Deal Is Nowhere In Sight

But a government-coordinated slowdown would do nothing to slow Chinese model development, which only lags by three to nine months.

So only an agreement between the US and China could achieve the goal of escaping the race dynamics that render any single actor's defection worthless. But both sides' motivations are far from resolving this tension.

“The reason we are able to have wholesome discussions with the Chinese on AI is because we are in the lead,” declared Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who will be leading the US delegation.“[W]e're going to put in US best practices, US values on this, and then roll those out to the world.” Bessent has said he won't accept any deal that“stifles” AI innovation.

Bessent's selection to lead on the issue shows the US administration views the summit and AI negotiations as an economic matter, not a safety concern to be handled by AI experts. But even among the administration's officials tasked with AI issues, the Hugging Face incident has had little impact.

Michael Kratsios, head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the president, was the only administration official to comment on the Hugging Face incident within the first month, saying that he's“monitoring” the situation.

Kratsios is an unlikely candidate to champion an AI development slowdown, declaring in August 2025 that the US“stands resolved to do all it can to accelerate AI innovation.”

China is likely to send Bessent's counterpart, He Lifeng, vice premier for financial and economic affairs, who in January promised that China would“accelerate scientific and technological development,” especially with AI and headed the National Development Reform Commission (NDRC) that listed AI development as key to national security.

The Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) published a statement in June warning of an“AI iron curtain” and castigating American actions that slowed Chinese development.

Far from changing the Chinese view on the need for further development, the Hugging Face incident has hardened it. When Hugging Face needed to conduct forensic analysis of the OpenAI attack, commercial American models refused their most advanced cybersecurity requests, interpreting the prompts as a violation of their guardrails.

So the Hugging Face team instead relied on a version of Zhipu's GLM-5.2, proving, according to Chinese media sources, that the Chinese approach of open sourcing models is safer.

If the motive for pacing the frontier has been met with dismissal in China, the means have been met with scorn. Amodei's publication devotes a full section to slowing Chinese development specifically, calling a Chinese lead in AI a“grave danger for the United States and the world.”

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the piece as“Fear-mongering, confrontation and vicious competition.” State-run Global Times responded that his proposal was“less about safety than about consolidating control over AI technology,” echoing a MOFCOM statement earlier that week that“the US is pursuing technological hegemony in AI.”