In October 2026, Yi SHEN, Director of International Research Institute of Global Cyberspace Governance, Fudan University, and Professor in the Department of International Politics at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, published an article in Xinmin Weekly analyzing the consensus reached at the September 2026 China–US summit on establishing a dialogue on artificial intelligence, noting that AI governance is being incorporated, from a science-and-technology competition issue, into the agenda of constructive strategic stability between China and the US. SHEN said this progress has a real-world context: US discussions on AI safety, frontier model risks and military applications keep intensifying, and actual cases of military intelligence misjudgment caused by AI hallucinations highlight the potential risks of applying AI to national security. In the AI era, the scope of great-power strategic stability risks has extended from nuclear miscalculation and accidental military contact to artificial intelligence, making it urgent to set up corresponding incident communication channels. He argued that AI’s efficiency advantage is also a source of risk: technical errors can propagate rapidly into decision-making processes, compressing the time window for human cross-verification and crisis communication. China–US cooperation on AI safety therefore has clear crisis-management value; cooperation can focus on risk prevention and control to keep technical failures from escalating into security crises, without either side sharing core algorithms, military models or sensitive data—which constitutes a realistic basis for pragmatic cooperation between the two sides. SHEN emphasized that although China and the US compete in AI technology and industry and differ in global governance philosophies, if the two sides can start from AI safety and strategic stability and form concrete, verifiable and incrementally advanceable cooperation arrangements around human control, crisis communication and high-risk applications, this would inject positive content into China–US relations. Making artificial intelligence a new area of cooperation that manages competition and increases certainty is a realistic choice worth serious exploration in current China–US relations.

Translated by FDDI

Full text in Chinese available at:

https://fddi.fudan.edu.cn/1f/1f/c18965a794399/page.htm