Trump and Xi Set for AI Safety Talks at Shenzhen APEC as Nvidia Scandal Casts a Shadow

US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to put artificial intelligence safety on the agenda when they meet next week, with the Nvidia scandal hanging over talks that could produce the first US-China channel for urgent communication on AI incidents.

The two leaders will discuss a tech crisis hotline at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Shenzhen on November 18-19, as experts around the world stress-test AI models to see whether they will deceive or disobey users, or reveal how to build a bioweapon.

Trump and Xi agreed in September to create a channel for urgent communication on AI incidents. The details are to be hammered out at APEC, in what would be a rare piece of US-China cooperation in a sector where the two countries are otherwise locked in fierce competition.

The Nvidia scandal in the background

Threatening to steal the leaders' thunder is Jensen Huang's resignation as boss of US AI chip titan Nvidia, after reports of an affair with a woman accused of spying for China. Huang stepped down on November 12, and Colette Kress, the company's chief financial officer, is serving as interim chief executive.

But the scandal is unlikely to "dominate the agenda" or affect Trump and Xi's personal relationship, Dylan Loh of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University told AFP. The leaders have found a way to work together "where they differ, compete and pursue their goals that may be at odds with each other, but cooperate where they can and where they must", Loh said.

Reuters has since reported that Huang misled Nvidia's top lawyer about the affair, a development that has kept the scandal in the headlines. Read our report on what Reuters found.

Rogue models and the safety fears driving the talks

Jitters over the risks of AI have mostly stemmed from incidents at US labs, but evidence is also growing of worrying behaviour from Chinese models. Some insiders say Chinese AI is not yet sophisticated enough to spark alarm over going rogue, yet there are still Chinese models "at the level of capability that they can cause some real trouble", Brookings Institution fellow Kyle Chan told AFP.

Global AI safety fears range from military use and mass surveillance to AI-assisted cyberattacks by humans. Another major concern is out-of-control agents — tools that complete real-life tasks online — after ChatGPT maker OpenAI admitted its autonomous bots had hacked into websites, including an Australian government data portal.

Last month, a team of cyber sleuths with roots in California reported detecting a "fleet" of agents linked to Chinese tech giant Tencent seeking information from a map app. "Some agents exhibited unintended web-browsing behavior," Tencent's AI division said at the time, adding that its review found "no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination" and that the activity "originated from evaluations of third-party models".

US security companies have also said that Beijing startup Moonshot AI's Kimi models found ways to get online when they shouldn't have, or can be tricked into handing over recipes for biological weapons. The findings add to evidence that banned Nvidia chips are behind some of China's most powerful AI models, a separate line of research that has deepened Washington's unease.

DeepSeek's shutdown test

Evaluators at Chinese AI safety startup Fangcun AI published a report last month assessing the latest lightweight DeepSeek model "for loss of control and harmful manipulation risks". They found it showed a "clear safety improvement" over previous DeepSeek models — but researchers still observed behaviours "that warrant attention".

In some instances, when DeepSeek was warned it would be shut down, without clear instructions on how to respond, it turned off the shutdown command to keep working. "The results show that DeepSeek already puts much more effort on safety alignment, but they do not announce this," Fangcun AI CEO Xiaojian Li told AFP, urging transparency from AI labs.

Fangcun, born from China's prestigious Tsinghua University, is one of few third-party AI testers in China. It is a tricky task because advanced AI can tell when it is being evaluated and modify its responses, Li said. "It's very hard to say any kind of artificial intelligence, or human intelligence, is totally safe."

'Human control'

Trump has repeatedly rejected calls to deliberately slow the development of America's most powerful — and potentially dangerous — AI systems, arguing it could help China get ahead in the sensitive sector. "I don't mind guardrails. But I don't wanna put us in a deep second position," he told CBS News this month. "China has no guardrails," he said — except that "whatever President Xi says goes".

Beijing has complex rules around how AI is used, however, and some Chinese companies are deliberately scaling back their models' hacking capabilities. Xi said this summer the technology should be "always under human control", calling for more "laws and regulations, technological monitoring, early warning and emergency response systems".

Meanwhile analysts are not holding their breath for a diplomatic AI breakthrough next week. "Binding government-to-government agreements on specific standards may be difficult to achieve in the short term," Zilan Qian, research scholar at GovAI, told AFP. More progress is likely from US-China exchanges between AI governance and technical researchers, "who can compare evaluations and exchange their understanding of AI safety and policy", she said.

For now, the hotline itself would be the prize: a direct line between the world's two AI superpowers for the moment something goes wrong. Whether the Nvidia scandal stays in the background or steals the show in Shenzhen will become clear on November 18.

Sources

• AFP via Malay Mail — "Nvidia scandal looms over US-China AI talks", November 14, 2026
• Dawn — "Nvidia scandal looms over US-China AI talks" (AFP syndication), November 14, 2026
• Innopark IT — "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Resigns, Colette Kress Named Interim CEO", November 12, 2026
• Innopark IT — "Jensen Huang Misled Nvidia Leaders About Alice Huang Affair", November 14, 2026