US and China agree on an AI incident channel, but only Washington calls it super intelligence
The White House gives the new hotline a single sentence, with a deadline for the next talks and none for the line itself.
On September 25, 2026, the White House said the United States and China will set up a direct line for AI emergencies. Its fact sheet on Xi Jinping's state visit calls it "a bilateral communication channel for SI incidents", and it comes in the very last line (after the giant pandas and the coal).
SI stands for super intelligence. The same fact sheet says the two presidents agreed to call the technology that instead of artificial intelligence.
- Who
- The United States and China
- New
- U.S.-China Super Intelligence (SI) Dialogue
- Also
- a bilateral communication channel for SI incidents
- Next exchange
- by November 2026
- Announced
- September 25, 2026
What the two sides agreed
The dialogue exists "to exchange views on risks and benefits related to SI", in the White House's words, and the next round is due by November 2026. The incident channel gets one sentence.
I was surprised how little that sentence carries. It doesn't say who picks up at either end, or what would count as an incident. The dialogue at least has a deadline. The channel doesn't.
Beijing's account says AI
China's own write-up of the leaders' meeting on September 24, a Xinhua report on the Chinese government's English site, says AI all the way through. In it Xi said the two sides "can continue to engage in dialogue on AI, exchange views on its risks and benefits, and work together to prevent the misuse and abuse of AI."
The two sides should maintain human control over AI technologies, uphold a people-centered approach and the principle of using AI for good, and ensure that AI serves human progress
The same report has Trump saying AI "bears on the future of humanity" and that the two countries should keep talking about it. So the words super intelligence don't appear in it once.
How Trump tells it
Trump gave his version on Truth Social at 8:46 a.m. Eastern on September 25. He added that "Everyone last night agreed, also."
Like almost everyone else, he seemed to like calling the poorly and inaccurately named Artificial Intelligence to a far more accurate and important name, SUPER INTELLIGENCE.
He'd set it up the day before. On the morning of September 24 he posted that "Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion" with Xi, and that he wanted to leave it "exactly where it is". (How he landed on the name is its own story, and Xi's welcome remarks are in our earlier brief.)
None of these three statements gives a date for the incident channel to start working. The only date on any of it is the next round of the dialogue, due by November 2026.
More on AI policy
- Trump renames AI "Super Intelligence" at the UN, a name that wasn't on his first ballotSeptember 25, 2026
- UK regulator proposes AI assistants like ChatGPT on Google's choice screens, with a prompt every yearSeptember 23, 2026
- The UN's AI panel spent its first thematic brief on 1,200 agents inside OpenAI's own testsSeptember 21, 2026
- Trump is forming an AI Force, but he calls the push to slow AI a hoaxSeptember 20, 2026