Will Chinese AI companies slow down? A top House Democrat wants answers

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He says both US and Chinese leaders lack the necessary urgency to rein in the technology’s risks.

He says both US and Chinese leaders lack the necessary urgency to rein in the technology’s risks.

As President Donald Trump prepares to meet tech and AI CEOs in Washington, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) is calling for a treaty between the US and China to keep AI from wreaking havoc on the world. But wrangling leaders in both countries to take action could be a long shot.

In letters shared exclusively with The Verge, Khanna — the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on China and a possible presidential contender — asked a US intelligence agency and Chinese AI companies whether they would be prepared for an incident like OpenAI agents’ hack of Hugging Face this summer. The companies included DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI, all of which are pursuing high-level artificial intelligence.

American and Chinese interests “could not be more different on many issues,” Khanna writes in the letter to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, “but on this discrete concern, it benefits neither country for humanity to lose control of our destiny.”

“[I]t benefits neither country for humanity to lose control of our destiny”

Khanna requests the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) assess how effectively the US might respond to an AI lab losing control of its bots — a scenario that’s become increasingly common in recent months. Alongside it, he asked the agency to evaluate the Chinese government’s approach to assessing catastrophic AI risks.

The information, he says, will help Congress and eventually the White House craft an agreement