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Secretary Bessent Unveils a U.S.-China AI Dialogue on CNBC's Squawk Box, Sep. 21, 2026

September 21, 2026 · U.S. Department of the Treasury · 0:22:24

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box on September 21, 2026, from the Nasdaq studio, in an interview the Treasury Department posted to its official channel. He had spent the previous day — about twelve hours, as he described it — in talks with his Chinese counterpart ahead of President Xi’s visit to Washington that week, covering economics and, newly, artificial intelligence, alongside unfulfilled deliverables from the leaders’ meeting at Busan the previous fall.

The AI news: “We’ve now formalized something called the U.S.-China AI Dialogues.” The two sides agreed to meet again in about two months in Shenzhen, to open an incident communications line — “constant communications especially in the event of some kind of an incident” — and to begin discussing shared protocols for the leading AI dangers, which he listed as uncontrollable agents and non-state actors in cyber and bioweapons. On tariffs, he said the stability in place since the previous fall will be maintained, and he described the “30 by 30” concept floated at Beijing: non-critical goods on each side brought down toward most-favored-nation tariff levels, operationalized by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer — more U.S. agriculture and energy sales one way, more Chinese everyday items and medical devices the other.

Pressed on AI liability, Bessent aligned himself with the position that responsibility stays with the labs: “It is humans who are responsible, not the AI.” The administration, he said, will not absolve the labs of liability and hand it to the government — “These labs need to take responsibility for themselves. They can slow down anytime they want to.”

Why it matters

The Squawk Box interview creates a new tracked institution: a standing U.S.-China AI dialogue with a named next meeting place and an incident line, announced by the Secretary who leads the administration’s economic policy — and it fixes the administration’s liability doctrine (labs keep responsibility) on the same record as the trade agenda it was negotiated beside.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the U.S.-China AI Dialogues as announced on September 21, 2026 — a follow-up meeting in Shenzhen in roughly two months and an incident communications line to be opened. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Secretary Bessent on CNBC’s Squawk Box” (official upload, embedded above). Interview as broadcast September 21, 2026; transcript reviewed in the site’s private research store. Details as stated by Secretary Bessent.