Bessent to Raise AI, Rare Earths and Trade in Weekend Talks with China's He

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is set to meet Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York City this weekend, with artificial intelligence, trade, rare earths and broader economic issues on the agenda.

The encounter carries weight because Washington and Beijing are the two principal drivers of advanced AI development and the worldwide uptake of the technology. Rare earths, meanwhile, are a critical input in technology manufacturing.

Bessent said he expects the talks to take in "both open- and closed-weight models." Open-weight systems have publicly accessible core components that users can download and adapt for particular tasks. Such Chinese models are gaining ground among US companies, in part because they can cost less than closed-weight tools of the kind built by Anthropic, OpenAI and other American firms.

Chinese AI models have also found their way into US government use. A federal website drew on a model from a Chinese company to let users search proposed regulations, even though the FBI has accused the model's developer, Alibaba, of "malicious" copying of Anthropic's technology.

The Bessent-He meeting is scheduled ahead of a summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on September 24 in Washington.