Scoop: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's proposed AI safety "notification mechanism" is simpler than that moniker suggests: It's an open channel between him and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, four people familiar told me, @PhelimKine and @_AriHawkins. politico.com/news/2026/09/22…

NEWS: @RepRoKhanna writes the CEOs of Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot asking them to cooperate in an intl effort to pace frontier AI. + Khanna will be hosting an emergency hearing on global AI pacing policy next Weds washingtonpost.com/wp-intell…

Glad to speak to @lilkuo in this nice @nytimes story to unpack the AI risks article by China's Minister of State Security. nytimes.com/2026/09/14/world…

The @globaltimesnews WeChat commentary on calls for a coordinated slowdown is quite something. Says the calls for slowing down AI development are reflective of a Cold War containment strategy, and that the “real purpose” is allegedly to use technological barriers and rule-setting monopolies to contain PRC’s AI development, preserve U.S.’s “monopolistic hegemony” in frontier tech, and exclude the PRC from global AI governance.

What are China’s biggest concerns about AI? A new article by Chen Yixin, China’s Minister of State Security, in the latest issue of China Cybersecurity Magazine offers some revealing clues. Chen identifies six major risks: 1. Regime security. Hostile forces and people with ulterior motives can use deepfakes, AI-generated text and images, and automated online accounts to cheaply and massively produce political rumors, spread harmful information, and incite social divisions—waging “public-opinion wars” and “cognitive warfare” against China and directly threatening its political, institutional, and ideological security. 2. Critical infrastructure. AI can enable countries and organizations to rapidly discover vulnerabilities, automatically chain together attack paths, and carry out sophisticated hacking operations, dramatically lowering the technical barriers and costs of cyberattacks against China’s critical information infrastructure. 3. Data leakage. Foreign intelligence agencies can use AI-powered web crawlers, data mining, and profiling to collect sensitive information, including critical national data, trade secrets, and citizens’ personal information. Chinese users who process sensitive information through foreign AI products or export data abroad could also cause large-scale data leaks. 4. Closed technological ecosystems. Countries with advantages in AI theory, model architecture, and computing power may invoke “national security” to impose technology controls, entity lists, monopolize technical standards, and build closed-source ecosystems, restricting other countries’ access to advanced technologies and fragmenting global AI supply chains. 5. Structural challenges to social governance. AI creates new uncertainties for social governance and public order. Algorithmic “black boxes” and data poisoning can amplify existing social biases; misuse of personal information can trigger crises of public trust; automated decision-making creates difficult questions of accountability; and the rapid development of AI is increasingly outpacing existing laws, ethics, and regulatory mechanisms. 6. A fundamental transformation of warfare. AI is pushing warfare into an era of “intelligentization.” Whoever can use algorithms to achieve more precise sensing, judgment, and targeting will gain the initiative on the battlefield. AI is moving from an auxiliary role to a central one in intelligence fusion, decision support, target identification, combat operations, and cognitive warfare. And what is the solution? Chen’s answer is revealing: strengthen “Party control over the internet” and “Party control over data,” and “transform the advantages of Party leadership into the effectiveness of AI governance.” In other words, from the CCP’s perspective, the central question is not simply AI versus no AI. Nor is it even fundamentally a contest between the US and China. It is a contest between the US and the CCP over who gets to control AI, data, information, and ultimately the future of society. And whoever wins that contest will decide the future of humanity. mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jsc97cKVY…

However in two crucial way when it comes to US-China AI safety dynamics the dynamics are utterly, spectacularly, different from the Cold War. First up: it’s important to establish how different the current US situation is. In the Cold War nuclear arms development and expertise was inside the state, influenced only by the government’s interests and agenda. This time AI expertise and development is taking place outside the state influenced overpoweringly by the prospect of trillion dollar IPOs. In the Cold War those influencing the President on nuclear weapons had no commercial motives to develop more of them.  Secondly, on the differences, the AI community speaks frequently about how “China means we have to keep going.” But there is no security instruction from men in grey suits in  the US intelligence community to keep going to these firms. Instead there was a political instruction from the White House to ignore AI safety because a group of commercially interested investors and oligarchs, many of whom have now changed their minds, convinced Trump this was nonsense that would damage the economy and benefit China. This is the fusion of Trump politics and Silicon Valley not the fusion of the Cold War state and the military-industrial complex.

We're publishing our most detailed threat intelligence report to date. It covers how people tried to misuse Claude—for cyberattacks, influence operations, surveillance, biology, and building weapons—and how we found and stopped them. We disrupted every operation in the report, and used the lessons from them to strengthen our safeguards. Where appropriate, we also shared what we found with authorities and other AI companies. These cases are not typical: we’re highlighting some of the most sophisticated misuse we’ve seen. But they’re especially important to discuss, because they show us where AI misuse is headed, where our safeguards work, and where they need to improve. We’re publishing this report so others can spot the same activity on their own platforms, and so we can give the public a clearer view of how emerging threats develop. Read the report: anthropic.com/threat-intelli…

Maybe the way to get China to slowdown AI development is not some unenforceable agreement based on trust but rather much tougher crackdowns on distillation, chip smuggling and remote access to AI chips?

CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis, speaking at the Billington cybersecurity conference: "It's been almost two years since the Salt Typhoon series of exploits has been publicly disclosed, and it's still a very critical threat."

New: Washington repeatedly blacklisted this Chinese tech giant. But through a network of global subsidiaries, the company has reinvented itself and kept shipping America's best chips to feed Chinese AI nytimes.com/2026/09/06/techn… with @paulmozur @trippmickle @KeithBradsher

If you read Xi Jinping’s ideological framework carefully, my three-line summary of the ideological changes he’s brought about in the Chinese system is as follows: mrkrudd.substack.com/p/the-e…

Some new information from Reuters on the AI safety discussions between the U.S. and China. Given the current climate it's seeming more and more likely that some new rules and agreements will emerge from this. - Both sides have discussed ​AI guardrails at a Track 1.5 dialogue ⁠in Beijing last week - 'Chinese officials have repeatedly stressed the importance of the AI talks in preparatory meetings with U.S. counterparts, and view them as a major deliverable of the U.S.-China leaders summit' - '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.' - 'In the past week, China's cyberspace regulator publicly warned about "extreme AI loss ⁠of control risks" and a state media-affiliated blog criticized Anthropic, emphasizing that any limits on frontier AI should apply equally to Chinese and U.S. models.' - "The Chinese side has expressed concern around whether the U.S. has sufficient regulation around the most advanced AI models. Both sides are motivated to make sure ⁠they can manage a cross-border crisis effectively," said Scott Singer, co-director of the China AI Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Wow - bipartisan former Secretaries of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin in the Washington Post today calling for the US and China to work toward a "AI Cooperation Treaty" in response to frontier AI risk.