BEIJING, June 24 — The economic stakes in the US-China AI rivalry are enormous, but the cybersecurity and systemic risks are now too great for either side to ignore. That was the clear message from a major artificial intelligence conference I attended just over a week ago in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s bustling high-tech district. The conference was packed with sessions covering everything from recursive self-improvement — the idea that AI models can tweak their own code and advance indefinitely — to humanoid robots.
It featured computing legends such as Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of public-key cryptography, and Andrew Barto, the Turing Award winner for pioneering work on reinforcement learning. Yet the dominant takeaway was not about any single breakthrough.
It was that the US and China should set aside their fierce AI rivalry. Frontier AI’s cybersecurity and systemic risks are too serious to ignore, and increasingly capable agentic models could soon cause chaos unless the world’s AI superpowers can work together. “AI is a global technology with global benefits, global harms, and a consistent tendency for new capabilities to eventually proliferate,” Stephen Casper, a computer scientist at MIT who spoke at the conference via video, told me afterward.
Until now, the US has largely viewed the competition through a national security lens. But the researchers in Beijing were making a different calculation.
They see a technology that does not respect borders. A model trained in one country can be deployed in another. A vulnerability found in one system can be exploited globally.
The concern is not abstract. Agentic models — AI systems that can take actions in the digital world — are becoming more capable. If they are not secured properly, they could cause real damage.
The experts at the conference used the term “Chernobyl moment” to describe the kind of catastrophic failure that could force a reckoning. This is a trade issue as much as a security one.
Central Asia sits between the two AI superpowers. Kazakhstan, for instance, is already seeing Chinese AI firms expand into the region while US cloud providers compete for government contracts. If the two sides cannot agree on basic safety protocols, the technology that flows into these markets could be unstable.
The conference in Zhongguancun made clear that the technical community on both sides understands the problem. The question is whether the political leadership in Washington and Beijing will listen.
Researchers are calling for joint work on cybersecurity standards and transparency around model capabilities. Data shows that AI development is accelerating, not slowing. The window for cooperation may be closing.
If the US and China continue to treat this as a zero-sum game, they risk a shared failure that neither can afford.
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