Just over a week ago, a major artificial intelligence conference in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s high-tech district, brought together leading AI experts from China and the United States. The event, organized by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, covered topics from recursive self-improvement—where models can tweak their own code and advance indefinitely—to humanoid robots. But the overwhelming takeaway, according to WIRED, was that the US and China should put aside their fierce AI rivalry and cooperate on safety.
The Growing Cybersecurity Threat
One day-long session at the conference highlighted the universality of cyber challenges raised by more advanced AI. These include new kinds of vulnerabilities in AI-generated code, novel ways of attacking systems enabled by agentic tool use, and automated methods for carrying out social engineering attacks. As AI becomes more powerful, more agentic, and more intertwined with everyday life, the risks that it could be used to conduct cyberattacks or fail in catastrophic ways will only grow.
Stephen Casper, a computer scientist at MIT who spoke via video, told WIRED: “AI is a global technology with global benefits, global harms, and a consistent tendency for new capabilities to eventually proliferate.” Casper pointed to research showing that the benefits of international collaboration on AI dangers outweigh any national security risks from working together. He likened the current situation to how the US and Soviet Union were forced to work together on nuclear dangers, even as they sought to out-stockpile one another. “One thing that almost everyone in AI can agree on right now is that AI doesn't need a Chernobyl moment,” he said.
The Case for Cooperation
Until now, the US has largely viewed China’s AI advances as an economic and national security threat. Washington has imposed tight restrictions on chips and chipmaking equipment to stymie the country’s development of powerful AI. Most recently, the US government ordered Anthropic to prevent foreign nationals from accessing its most powerful models, Mythos and Fable 5, over national security concerns. In response, Anthropic revoked access for everyone. One company that was of particular concern, WIRED previously revealed, was a South Korean telecom giant with alleged ties to China.
But the conference reinforced the idea that both the US and China stand to lose if AI is developed too quickly and recklessly. Because the world’s two dominant AI powers are responsible for the most advanced models, cooperation between them feels crucial, according to attendees.
Expert Voices: Balancing Openness and Risk
After another session, Lin Yun, a professor at Shanghai Jia Tong University who specializes in AI and computer security, told WIRED that he expects hackers to gain an advantage over the near term, but that new countermeasures, including novel uses of AI, should tip the balance back toward defense over time. Yun said that even if international cooperation is complicated by competition, it should remain a priority. “If different countries understand the risks in similar ways, it becomes easier to develop shared safety principles and technical standards,” he said. “The key is to find areas where sharing can reduce systemic risk without exposing sensitive operational details.”
Open-Weight Models and the Future
Perhaps the most pressing question for both nations, the conference highlighted, is how to balance openness with risk. Open-weight models have become crucial for research and innovation, with Chinese models proving popular in the US. But as these models advance, it will become more challenging to ensure they don’t help hackers identify security vulnerabilities and can’t be wielded as cyber weapons. The conference featured a few legends of computing, including Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of public-key cryptography, and Andrew Barto, who won the Turing Award with Rich Sutton for pioneering work on reinforcement learning—underscoring the historical weight of the cooperation call.
For enterprise technology leaders, the message is clear: the cybersecurity risks of frontier AI are systemic and borderless. As agentic models become more capable, supply chain and logistics systems—heavily reliant on AI for automation and decision-making—could become targets. The need for shared safety principles and technical standards between the world’s AI superpowers is not just a geopolitical issue but a practical one for any organization building on top of these technologies.
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