US, China Experts Urge Nuclear-Style Guardrails for Military AI

Security experts from the United States and China have proposed a set of safeguards for military artificial intelligence, warning that increasingly autonomous systems could create risks of accidental escalation between the two nuclear-armed powers.

The recommendations, published last week, emerged from a US-China dialogue that helps inform official discussions. They include red lines around nuclear systems, a requirement that humans retain control over consequential cyberattacks, and a dedicated hotline for incidents involving autonomous AI.

Among the scenarios the experts flagged is an AI system interfering with a nuclear command network or launching a military cyber operation, which could leave Washington or Beijing with only minutes to judge whether the other side had attacked.

The proposals were authored by Melanie Sisson, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Tianjiao Jiang, an associate professor at Fudan University. Both took part in a US-China AI and national security dialogue convened since 2019 by Brookings and Tsinghua University's Center for International Security and Strategy.

They were published ahead of planned government-level AI talks and an expected September 24 meeting in Washington between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The recommendations reflect how the US-China AI rivalry is expanding beyond competition over chips and advanced models into questions long associated with arms control: preventing accidents from being mistaken for attacks, limiting machine-made military decisions, and setting communication protocols for nuclear-armed rivals when technology behaves unexpectedly.

Sisson argued that humans should retain sole authority to initiate AI-enabled cyberattacks against the other country's nuclear command, control and communications systems or strategically important infrastructure. An autonomous system could malfunction, exceed its instructions or be compromised, while the country under attack might struggle to determine whether the action was accidental or ordered.

Jiang proposed explicit red lines preventing AI from independently deciding to use nuclear weapons or autonomously attacking nuclear command systems, along with protections for critical infrastructure including energy, finance and healthcare. He also urged a shared definition of "meaningful human control" so that both countries cannot use identical language to justify different levels of machine autonomy.

The idea builds on a principle endorsed by then-US President Joe Biden and Xi in November 2024 that humans should retain control over decisions to use nuclear weapons.

Jiang also proposed a dedicated US-China military hotline for AI incidents, warning that automated cyber exchanges could escalate too quickly for human intervention. One country's defensive AI might automatically respond to suspicious activity, while the other side could interpret that response as an attack and retaliate before understanding what happened. A hotline could allow one government to tell the other that an unusual AI operation was accidental, unauthorised or still under investigation before it was treated as deliberate state action.

However, experts including Carla Freeman at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies have questioned the utility of the existing US-China military crisis communication hotline, citing Chinese officials' refusal to answer US counterparts' calls about the "spy balloon incident" in February 2023. The Chinese bureaucracy's rigid top-down hierarchy also disempowers low-ranking officers from taking the initiative during engagements with US counterparts, she wrote in January.

Neither government has publicly endorsed the Brookings-Tsinghua proposals, but China has increasingly placed AI inside its existing arms-control bureaucracy. AI is a formal portfolio of the Foreign Ministry's Department of Arms Control, which also handles nuclear weapons, non-proliferation, missiles and other international security issues.

Shen Jian, China's ambassador for disarmament affairs, told a UN meeting in Geneva in June that military AI could affect strategic stability and raise risks of miscalculation and conflict escalation, and that weapons should remain under human control. China also argues that AI safety should not become a pretext for technological barriers.

Washington has no equivalent single arms-control home for AI, with national security policy spread across the White House National Security Council, State Department, Pentagon and other agencies. Both governments remain wary of measures that could slow their own technological development. Trump has warned broad restraints could hand China an advantage, while Beijing views many US technology controls as attempts to preserve American dominance.