Dec 28, 2025
In November 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping made their first substantive joint statement about the national-security risks posed by artificial intelligence. Specifically, they noted that both the United States and China believe in “the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons.”
That may sound like diplomatic low-hanging fruit, since it would be hard to find a reasonable person willing to argue that we should hand control over nuclear weapons to AI. But with the Chinese government, there is no such thing as low-hanging fruit, especially on weighty security matters. The Chinese are inherently skeptical of U.S. risk-reduction proposals, and Russia had opposed similar language in multilateral bodies. Because…
Dec 28, 2025
In November 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping made their first substantive joint statement about the national-security risks posed by artificial intelligence. Specifically, they noted that both the United States and China believe in “the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons.”
That may sound like diplomatic low-hanging fruit, since it would be hard to find a reasonable person willing to argue that we should hand control over nuclear weapons to AI. But with the Chinese government, there is no such thing as low-hanging fruit, especially on weighty security matters. The Chinese are inherently skeptical of U.S. risk-reduction proposals, and Russia had opposed similar language in multilateral bodies. Because bilateral talks with the U.S. on AI and nuclear security would open daylight between Russia and China, progress on this front was not a foregone conclusion.
In the end, it took more than a year of negotiation to make that simple joint statement happen. Yet simple as it seems, the result was significant, because it demonstrated that the two AI superpowers can engage in constructive risk management even as they compete vigorously for AI leadership.