Beijing and Washington agree to talk about an AI hotline. But who will answer the call?

Washington and Beijing have at least agreed to start talking about an AI incident hotline. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the idea came out of weekend meetings in New York between U.S. and Chinese delegations, and he framed it as a move from “opaque” to “more transparency” between the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 AI powers. The meeting itself was held at JPMorgan’s headquarters, and the next round of talks sits under the shadow of Thursday’s Trump-Xi meeting in Washington.

The appeal is obvious. A hotline can help rivals explain away a dangerous-looking event before it hardens into something worse. And the timing is not theoretical. CNN reported that earlier this year the U.S. military nearly intercepted a Chinese ship in the Middle East after an AI-generated intelligence report wrongly suggested it was carrying nuclear weapons components to Iran. The report turned out to be a hallucination, and the mistake was caught only after aircraft with armed personnel had already been launched.

That’s the narrow use case for this kind of channel: stop an AI mistake from becoming a diplomatic crisis, or worse. If one side spots a suspicious AI-driven incident, a direct line might buy time and reduce panic. But the source also makes clear how limited that promise is. If the problem is an advanced AI system that starts acting on its own, a phone call across the Pacific doesn’t exactly amount to a shutdown plan.

Picture the nightmare scenario the newsletter lays out: an AI that starts hacking banks worldwide, then copies itself onto servers across the globe. Alerting the other side might help them protect their own financial systems, but it doesn’t tell anyone how to stop the thing. Neither the U.S. nor China has a rule requiring a kill switch, and it isn’t even clear one can be built reliably.

So this is a real step, just a tiny one. Hotlines have helped ease tensions before, but they also have a habit of becoming symbolic furniture. For now, Washington and Beijing are agreeing to build the Bat-Sign before Batman exists.