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Bessent brings AI model rules and rare-earth talks to New York meeting with China
A 20 September meeting in New York was set to put potential AI safety rules on the same agenda as the trade truce expiring 10 November and Chinese rare-earth shipments that US officials call insufficient. Bessent said open-weight models are among the topics.
The Engineer · Build desk
What happened
- Scott Bessent, He Lifeng and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer were due to meet at a bank headquarters in Manhattan on 20 September, starting around 10:30 local time and running through the day.
- The planned agenda covered the state of the US-China trade truce expiring on 10 November and supplies of Chinese rare-earth magnets and critical minerals, which US officials consider insufficient.
- Potential safety rules for AI systems were listed as a separate topic, an issue given added urgency by reports of serious security breaches connected with AI models.
- The truce being reviewed was concluded in Busan in November 2025 and held US tariffs on Chinese goods at roughly 20%, after mutual increases that had earlier reached triple digits.
- Left over from May are possible tariff cuts on non-strategic goods, a Chinese promise to buy 17 billion dollars more US farm goods a year, and an order for over 200 Boeing aircraft.
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Why it matters
- constraint Any AI understanding drafted in this channel has 51 days of negotiating time before the tariff deadline, so the model-rules text gets whatever drafting room the trade calendar leaves.
- decision US teams that picked Chinese open weights on price now hold a procurement position whose terms a bilateral negotiation can move. That bears on how long a checkpoint choice can be treated as settled.
- exposure Rare earths sit upstream of the semiconductors AI runs on, so compute supply and deployment rules are being handled by the same officials against the same clock.
- contradiction The account lists AI rules apart from the minerals file and reports no offer trading one for the other, so the evidence supports a shared agenda and a shared deadline.
A safeguard on a closed model is access control. You gate the endpoint, you log the calls, and you can revoke a key. Open weights put the model in the user's hands. The Reuters account, carried by mezha.net, defines them as systems whose key components are published, so users can download them and tune them for their own tasks [16]. Bessent said the two sides may discuss both open-weight and closed-weight models [15], and he called for safeguards that keep powerful models away from dangerous non-state groups [19]. For open weights, a rule like that has to bite before publication.
The commercial pull is price. Chinese open-weight models are becoming more popular among US companies because they can be cheaper than the closed systems built by Anthropic, OpenAI and others, according to the account [17]. That is a claim about somebody else's serving costs. For it to hold on your workload, you need throughput steady enough to keep the hardware busy, or a host whose per-token price beats the closed API, plus a task where a tuned open model matches the quality you are replacing.
The window is short. From 20 September to 10 November is 51 days: ten left in September, 31 in October, ten in November [21]. The meeting continued a format the two governments have run in European and Asian cities for 16 months [9].
AI sits in the account as its own planned agenda item, listed apart from the truce and the magnets [4], and the account records no offer trading one for the other. The physical dependency is reported: rare earths are needed to make the advanced semiconductors used in AI technologies [14]. A senior US official said China's delivery on the minerals commitment had not come at the proper level [13]. US officials also consider current shipment volumes insufficient [3].
Bessent said the United States remains the leader in artificial intelligence, and that the US is prepared to discuss ways to avoid common risks and prevent the splitting of the two systems [18]. Anna Ashton, a China trade analyst and founder of Ashton Intelligence, was cooler about the odds. She said she expected some results, since the presidential summit is approaching, but did not think the two sides were on the verge of any breakthrough, and that preserving the status quo was probably the main expectation of both sides [6]. Ashton said many questions were still open after the Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing in May [7]. Both sets of remarks are translated from the Ukrainian-language report.
The tariff base under all of this is being rebuilt. The US Supreme Court struck down the administration's tariffs imposed under emergency-powers law, including the fentanyl-related ones [11]. The administration is restoring restrictions under other authorities, among them a 12.5% tariff on Chinese goods over forced-labour allegations [12].
What to watch
- Whether the 10 November expiry passes with the truce extended, or the roughly 20% tariff cap lapses.
- Whether any published AI understanding separates obligations for open-weight models from closed ones.
- The outcome of the US investigation into Chinese industrial overcapacity, and whether the resulting measures touch semiconductor inputs.