OpenAI advocates for AI governance body globally

OpenAI says AI needs the same regulation as nuclear energy and wants the US to initiate the creation of a global regulator to handle it. 

As reported by Cryptopolitan, this comes as President Trump traveled to Beijing for the first US–China state visit in nine years, during which AI policy was expected to be on the agenda.

According to Chris Lehane, the vice president of global affairs at OpenAI, Trump and Xi in the same room is a rare opportunity for the two nations to build something lasting for AI.

“AI, in some level, transcends a lot of the prevailing or traditional trade type of issues. There is an opportunity to really start to build something up globally, and have countries around the world, including China, potentially participate,” Chris Lehane said during a briefing.

What is OpenAI, and why is its opinion about global policy a big deal?

OpenAI is the American company that developed ChatGPT, a popular AI assistant/chatbot used by hundreds of millions of people every day.

The company has always participated in every major debate about powerful AI systems. Its CEO, Sam Altman, usually meets with heads of state to discuss AI and even testifies before Congress, giving the company significant influence over global AI policy.

OpenAI is also in a separate legal fight after Tesla CEO Elon Musk sued the company in 2024. Musk is one of OpenAI’s original founders, and he says that Sam Altman and other executives went against the company’s nonprofit mission and made it a for-profit organization. 

The trial is still running, but the bigger story this week is happening in Beijing.

What did OpenAI propose, and what is the IAEA comparison?

Vice President of Global Affairs at OpenA, Chris Lehane, proposed linking two things to create something new.

He wants the US Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation and AI safety institutes to come together and build a global network. He used the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as an example of how countries connected their nuclear regulators into one overal body. 

The US Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation is a government office that creates technical standards for AI systems. 

At the same time, countries are establishing AI institutes worldwide. For example, the UK has one, the EU is developing frameworks, and several Asian governments are also working on similar bodies. 

Lehane said a unified body for AI will help build safer, more resilient systems that are less susceptible to attacks. He also wants the US government to make it mandatory for the country’s researchers to test the most powerful AI models before deploying them. 

What is the Mythos model, and why does it rattle both Washington and Beijing?

Mythos is a new, powerful AI model that found “thousands” of major vulnerabilities in operating systems and other software. Anthropic (the AI safety company backed by Google and Amazon) developed Mythos.

The scale of what Mythos can do shocked the world as banks and governments scrambled to fix their security defenses after the announcement. White House officials even acknowledged that models like Mythos made communication with China more important than ever before. 

China was locked out of early access to a Mythos preview, raising concerns about the ability of the country’s developers and government to defend themselves against attacks that use the AI model. 

Market intelligence firm IDC China even warned that leaving China out of Mythos could create a “generational gap” in AI defense capabilities between China and the West. 

According to researchers, attackers could use advanced AI to design bioweapons, trigger financial shocks, or act autonomously without human control. The scariest part is that AI just needs to be powerful, fast, and pointed in the wrong direction to do all these things. 

What happened at the Trump-Xi meeting, and what did they discuss?

The US delegation to China included Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and top White House technology policy advisor Michael Kratsios. Their presence on the trip made the meeting a priority and an urgent issue, as both sides came prepared to discuss AI issues directly. 

China proposed a formal dialogue on AI issues, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Finance Minister Liao Min. But expectations for the channel are low because neither agency specializes in AI.

The US also planned to raise concerns that Chinese developers were using outputs from advanced AI models to build systems at a fraction of the cost, but with fewer safety guardrails.

Both sides also discussed the possibility of establishing a no-blame hotline to report suspected AI-driven incidents, similar to military hotlines.

Analysts even suggested that both governments could commit to guardrails for frontier AI models, similar to the 2015 US-China Cybersecurity Agreement.

Finally, the discussions could also touch on the MATCH Act, a proposed US law that aims to limit China’s access to semiconductor supply chains. 

Sun Chenghao of Tsinghua University participated in the US-China AI talks and said the US should draw a clear line between managing AI safety risks and simply trying to block China’s technological development. 

“China likely hopes the US will appropriately distinguish between AI governance and technological containment,” Sun Chenghao said. 

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