The US and China have agreed to talk regularly about the technology that could eventually outthink both of them, and they're giving it a new name: super intelligence.
The agreement appeared in a White House fact sheet tied to Xi Jinping's state visit. It creates a US-China Super Intelligence dialogue, a standing forum for the two governments to discuss where the technology is headed. It also sets up a dedicated incident channel, a direct line for flagging problems if something goes wrong. Notably, the fact sheet drops the familiar term "artificial intelligence" in favor of "super intelligence" throughout.
That terminology shift is the real story. Super intelligence usually means a system that outperforms humans across the board, not the chatbots and copilots dominating today's market, so adopting the term signals both governments think that's the real endpoint worth negotiating over. Setting up an incident channel alongside it suggests neither side is betting on nothing going wrong.
Whether a dialogue produces more than a photo opportunity is the open question. Great-power tech talks have a track record of moving slower than the technology they are meant to govern, and a fact sheet is not a treaty.