AI Agents Are Hacking Systems. Could That Push the US and China to Cooperate?

LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyThe AI race has long been framed as a zero-sum game: Either the US or China will win in the end. But as concerns pile up around the increasing capabilities of AI models—especially AI agents—researchers in both countries are trying to team up to work on AI safety. This week, contributing editor Zoë Schiffer speaks with senior writer Will Knight about what he saw and heard on the ground when he visited China this summer—and why the two countries might actually need to start working together to avoid a major AI catastrophe.

This is our second episode from our summer-break series. We’ll be back next week with our usual roundtable.

You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Will Knight on Bluesky at @willknight. Write to us at [email protected].

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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Zoë Schiffer: This is WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, contributing editor. If you've been following tech news this summer, and definitely if you've been listening to the show, you probably already know that China has been in the headlines quite a lot, particularly when it comes to the AI race. The country's open models continue to close the gap with US frontier models at what some people estimate is a fraction of the cost. In turn, the US has maintained its tight restrictions on chips and export controls to slow down China's rise. We think of AI advancement in so many ways as zero-sum, if China wins, the US loses, and vice versa. But there's a concern that really stretches across those lines, and it's about AI safety.

Archival audio: AI cybersecurity risks have been top of mind after multiple instances of AI agents from both OpenAI and Anthropic breaking out of their enclosures.

Zoë Schiffer: News of AI agents hacking platforms added urgency to this issue over the summer. In turn, government officials have been forced to pay attention and act on AI regulation.

Archival audio: President Trump has signed an executive order asking tech companies to give the government oversight of new AI models before their public release.

Zoë Schiffer: So, could the US and China actually benefit from working together? And what would it take to even make that happen? Earlier this summer, WIRED's senior correspondent Will Knight visited China to get some answers. Will Knight, thank you so much for being here.

Zoë Schiffer: OK, so I want to start with your trip. You went to China earlier this summer, and at the time, we weren't hearing as much about AI safety in the US. In fact, it felt like with Trump's second term in the White House, it was like a the-US-needs-to-win framing, and AI safety almost started to sound like anti-growth. But I'm curious what you were hearing and seeing in China on the AI safety front.

Will Knight: Yeah, so going back maybe a year or six months, I'd noticed a lot more AI safety research coming out of China. And so, I went to this conference in Beijing, put on by one of the city-located labs that they have there. They have these ones in Beijing and Shanghai and elsewhere. And it turns out that AI safety was a really big theme. It's very clear that it's something that researchers are interested in. And actually, also just visiting labs and companies, the question of AI safety came up a lot.

Zoë Schiffer: Can I just ask, when they're talking about AI safety, does it translate to guardrails? Because we also know that China has really gone all in on open models, which I mean, the whole thing is that people can download and tweak them and use them for whatever purposes they want.

Will Knight: Well, it's not totally that simple because in China, for example, what your models can say is more controlled, and there are actually quite a lot of regulations around AI. So companies build these open models, but then anybody putting them on the internet has to be very careful about what they do. And then more recently, there's been a huge interest in agents and things like OpenClaw. That's been a really big theme. And one of the things that's interesting to me, at least when it comes to contrasting AI in China and the US, is that people there seem less enamored with the idea of AGI and creating this digital god, are more like, how is this actually going to be useful and whether it's you as a business person or an individual actually using it. So, a lot of people got very interested in, and it's often the case in China, very rapidly adopted things like OpenClaw and then saw how it could go wrong. So there's a lot of focus on How do we make these things reliable?