U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Cristian L. Ricardo
Senator Chris Coons says the US and China need bilateral AI safety cooperation before the technology outpaces lawmakers entirely
Senator Chris Coons wants President Trump to put artificial intelligence at the top of the agenda when he next sits down with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Delaware Democrat framed the stakes in terms usually reserved for warheads, not algorithms: he compared the need for AI cooperation to the nuclear arms negotiations that defined Cold War diplomacy.
Coons made the case during a Bloomberg interview on September 13, arguing that the rapid pace of AI development has left legislators scrambling to keep up. Pausing AI research unilaterally, he said, is a fantasy given the competitive dynamics between Washington and Beijing. The only realistic path forward, in his view, is a framework both countries can agree to.
The chip gap and the legislation behind it #
The senator’s argument rests partly on raw production numbers. The US currently produces over 10 million advanced AI chips annually. China, by contrast, manufactures roughly 200,000. That’s a 50-to-1 ratio, and Coons wants to keep it that way.
He has championed the SAFE Chips Act, legislation designed to codify restrictions on exporting advanced AI semiconductors to China. The bill would formalize what has until now been a patchwork of executive-branch export controls targeting high-end processors like Nvidia’s H-series GPUs.
US administrations across party lines have already moved to limit China’s access to cutting-edge chip technology. But those restrictions have largely been executive actions, which can be reversed, softened, or simply not enforced by a successor. Coons wants them written into statute, making them far harder to undo.
A summit that produced handshakes but no signatures #
This isn’t the first time AI has come up in Trump-Xi diplomacy. The two leaders met in Beijing in May 2026, where AI guardrails and the export of Nvidia’s H200 chips were reportedly on the table. They left without signing any formal agreement.
China has publicly stated its goal of becoming the world’s leading AI power by 2030. That’s precisely why Coons invoked the nuclear analogy. The US and Soviet Union managed to negotiate arms reduction treaties despite being existential adversaries. The logic was that certain risks were too catastrophic for either side to manage alone. Coons believes AI belongs in that category.
Altman floats a Nobel-worthy treaty #
Coons isn’t the only prominent voice pushing for a bilateral framework. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggested on the same day that a US-China AI safety treaty, even one as simple as a single page, could be worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
The challenge, as always, is enforcement. Nuclear arms treaties came with extensive verification mechanisms: inspectors, satellite monitoring, counting warheads. AI doesn’t lend itself to that kind of physical auditing. Any meaningful AI safety treaty would need to solve the verification problem, something neither country has proposed a credible mechanism for yet.
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