Big-Company CEOs Want Trump To Talk AI Safety With China. Few Expect It Will Happen

Amid growing global concern over the safety of generative artificial intelligence, CEOs of some of America’s largest companies hope President Donald Trump will collaborate with China on guidelines address the problem with China’s President Xi Jinping.

Few expect he will do so.

At an off-the-record meeting in Washington organized by Yale’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute on Tuesday, host Jeffrey Sonnenfeld polled the 100-plus business and government leaders on hand to get a sense of how they thought U.S. should manage the growing great-power rivalry over the technology.

Asked if President Trump should address collaborating with China on Al safety guidelines during his upcoming meeting with President Xi, 88 percent of those polled said yes.

But 74 percent of those polled said they doubted President Trump would do so at their meeting, scheduled for September 24 in Washington.

For good reason. President Trump, in a post this week on Truth Social, called safety concerns about renegade AI “a sick conspiracy” and said that the only guardrails needed in AI development were “a STRONG AND SMART (high IQ!) PRESIDENT and the U.S. has that in spades!”

The poll comes as the leaders of both Anthropic and OpenAI have been vocal in their concerns about the speed and power of the technology. Both have publicly called for new government regulation of the industry and a potential deliberate deceleration in the “pacing” of AI development. 

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported this week on worries within the highest levels of the Chinese government about the potential impact of AI on the regime there.

In other polling questions from the event, attendees were split on the level of true Chinese innovation in AI versus being fast followers of U.S. technology.

Some 58 percent believed China was “genuinely innovating” versus 42 percent who thought China was “more reliant on the U.S. than it admits.”

Responding to another survey question, 52 percent said they believed Chinese influence operations were at least partially behind the public backlash in the U.S. against AI, versus 48 percent who said no.

And 55 percent said that potential “pacing” of AI advancement by U.S. companies would harm the country in the technology race with China versus 45 percent who said it would not.