Bitcoin (BTC) Near $75,700 as Bessent Opens AI Risk Talks With China

AI Risks Enter the New York Agenda

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has opened the door to direct talks on artificial intelligence risks with China, saying Washington will raise shared dangers at economic meetings in New York this weekend. The outreach places AI safety — long a fringe topic in bilateral trade talks — on the same table as tariffs, rare earths and market access, and it lands just eight days before President Donald Trump hosts Xi Jinping in Washington on September 24.

Bessent attached one firm limit: the United States will not slow its own AI development, and it continues to treat the technology as a race it intends to win. Together with United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, he will sit down with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng for several hours, in sessions set to cover AI, trade and rare earths.

“The United States remains the leader in AI, and we are open to discussions on avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems. We expect our discussions to cover both open and closed weight models,” Bessent said ahead of the meetings.

Bifurcation describes the scenario in which the two economies drift into separate AI stacks that no longer interoperate — a cold-war partition of models, chips and standards. Open-weight models, by contrast, are systems whose underlying settings are published for anyone to download and reuse, an ethos not far removed from how a governance token distributes control to a community rather than a single operator.

Neither government has said it will cap its own frontier work. Officials frame the New York sessions as engagement, not agreement, and acknowledge that a genuine safety breakthrough remains a difficult task. The September 24 summit is the first real test of whether the dialogue produces substance beyond symbolism.

Washington and Beijing Reject a Slowdown

Both capitals spent the past week rejecting calls to pump the brakes. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay on September 12 urging rivals to slow capability gains, arguing the frontier is outrunning safety work. Trump rejected the idea two days later, dismissing the entire AI safety debate as a hoax while appearing live on stage with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang — footage of the exchange circulated widely on X. Despite the presidential endorsement, Nvidia and chip stocks slid as Wall Street weighed the growing chorus of safety warnings against the data-center buildout.

Beijing's position mirrors Washington's speed-first stance. China's foreign ministry described the slowdown push as fear-mongering and said all parties should promote open and inclusive AI development. The split was visible days earlier, when Xi called for a consensus-based global governance framework while Washington continued to push pace; a congressional effort to pause frontier work, meanwhile, has stalled.

The overlap with crypto is practical, not rhetorical. Open-weight models are already being wired into decentralized applications (dapps), where an autonomous agent typically depends on a blockchain oracle to pull verified off-chain data before acting on-chain. If the New York talks harden into export-control escalation, the capital funding both AI and crypto infrastructure tightens; if they ease tensions, risk appetite across the sector broadly improves. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on MEXC.

September 24 as the Risk-Asset Test

Read together, the two threads describe engagement without agreement. Bessent's team is talking, neither side is slowing down, and the only hard date on the calendar is September 24. For Bitcoin (BTC) — trading near $75,700 at the time of writing — the practical question is whether the summit hardens technological partition or softens it: bifurcation means tighter export controls and tighter capital flows, while de-escalation means liquidity. COINOTAG's read is that the AI-trade package, from data-center energy demand to the infrastructure shared with Bitcoin DeFi experimentation, now moves on the same macro clock as the summit.