US Treasury's Bessent plans to discuss AI and rare earths with China's He, source says

Scott Bessent is packing a briefcase for a chat with China's He ahead of a Trump–Xi summit in Washington on Sept 24, and the agenda is a lovely little double bill: AI and rare earths. Magnets and model weights, haggled over in the same meeting like a supermarket meal deal. One assumes the catering will be exquisite, because the deliverables are unlikely to be.

The line worth savouring is Bessent's stated expectation that the discussions cover 'both open- and closed-weight models.' Two years of Western policy has rested on the premise that those two things are moral opposites — open weights a proliferation hazard, closed weights the responsible grown-up option. Now they're a matched pair, like cufflinks, to be set out on the baize next to the lithium. It is the kind of flexibility one admires in a Treasury secretary and dreads in absolutely everyone else.

Then there's Bessent's recent call for the US and China to agree AI 'guardrails,' aimed, in his phrasing, at keeping powerful models out of the hands of 'malign non-state actors.' Read it slowly. States are fine. Only the non-state sort are malign — which spares all present the awkwardness of auditing what the state actors have been building, and where, and how fast. If Sept 24 yields a joint working group, a firm handshake and a commitment to 'continued dialogue,' that will be chalked up as a triumph of statecraft. The article holds out no prospect of anything more concrete. Rare earths, at least, get dug out of the ground and counted in a warehouse. A model weight, once published, cannot be recalled by communiqué, and everyone in that room knows it.