The Trump-Xi Summit Showdown

Ian Krietzberg (0:02)

I did not speak to a single person who thought, yeah, they've got this, they're going to handle it, and we're going to have some sort of deal, agreement, partnership on AI safety between the US and China.

Peter Hamby (0:20)

Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Thursday, September 24th. Today, I'm joined by Ian Krietzberg to break down whether the US and China can actually negotiate an AI safety framework with Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meeting in Washington this week, and huddling with some of the biggest leaders in AI, including Sam Altman, Jensen Wong, Mark Zuckerberg, and more. Will Trump use the moment to pursue the Nobel Peace Prize that he so desperately craves? Ian is here to discuss all the angles. We'll talk about all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.

Happy Thursday, everybody, and welcome to The Powers That Be. This week, we have a huge geopolitical and technological moment happening in Washington. President Xi gets to Washington. He's going to meet with Donald Trump. There's going to be a state dinner. There's lots of issues to talk about. There's trade and tariffs, of course, between the two countries, Taiwan, security issues, wars. But of course, everyone is wondering about AI and whether these two countries, the US and China, can come up with some sort of safety framework heading forward as fears about AI destroying us all rise in this country and really around the world. It's not just that, but that's a piece of it. There's also going to be a lot of big tech and AI CEOs joining Trump and Xi for a closed door meeting to talk about all of it. We, of course, have Ian Krietzberg of The Hidden Lair joining us. Ian, great to see you.

Are Trump and Xi going to solve all of our concerns about AI this week?

Ian Krietzberg (2:23)

Yes, we can go home. We can end the episode.

No, probably not. That's a good answer.

Peter Hamby (2:32)

It's hard to be glib. The technological advancements are happening at such a pace.

It's not just US and China that our players here need to be worried about AI when it comes to economic disruption, catastrophic safety, etc. This is an issue for the whole world. It just feels like there's a lot of pressure on these two to do something, even though whatever that something is, doesn't feel like it might be relevant in a year or two years or three years. But I guess they do have to do something.

Ian Krietzberg (3:05)

Yeah. I think pressure is the right word.

The timing of this is all very interesting. You mentioned this crazy rise in AI safety concerns around the world, but primarily the two AI superpowers, we're going to use that phrasing, is the US and China. No other country is quite at the level that the US and China are at, so you have that. Then you have this explosion in fear, and fear might be underselling it a little bit when it comes to AI safety concerns that you and I have talked about a bunch on this show and that have taken a lot of the oxygen out of the room, not just of AI, but have broken into the mainstream, which has been a very odd thing to watch. So what I've seen is the timing of these events, right? This was the summer that AI safety went mainstream. And as it got more and more intense, and as the concern got stronger in a broader and more varied way, you started seeing people saying, hey, OK, listen, this is very scary, but what good timing. Trump is meeting with Xi. They could not have picked a better time to have this summit because of all these safety concerns, because everyone has acknowledged for a long time that in order for a safety thing to happen, in order to really pace the frontier, you need global cooperation. China as the number two in the AI space in terms of global competition, needs to be at the same table. We need to have an agreement. And so that's how a lot of people were looking at it. And you saw in Dario's essay about pacing the frontier, he says, we need the cooperation of China.

Sam suggested that Trump and she would each get a Nobel Peace Prize if they walk away from the summit solving, as you mentioned at the top, with some solution to this problem, some agreement. Other folks are talking up the idea of a grand deal, where they can just hammer some issues out and then we can walk away and have a nice announcement and terms and everyone's aligned on safety. So that's the pressure that's being put on this.