And the access decisions themselves are already becoming geopolitical. The EU, notably, has still not been granted access to Mythos, even as OpenAI has moved to provide European cybersecurity teams access to its own cyber model. These are unilateral judgments by private companies, not a policy framework.
The window won’t stay open for long
More capable AI can accelerate the development of still more capable AI. The country — or company, or actor — with the strongest models today has structural advantages in building tomorrow’s models.
What Washington and Beijing discuss in Beijing this week will not resolve the fundamental tension between competitive AI development and the risks that development creates. But the establishment of even narrow deconfliction channels — a hotline logic for AI crises, shared norms around the most dangerous applications, transparency mechanisms that let each side verify the other isn’t crossing agreed lines — would represent meaningful progress over the current state, which is no framework at all.
