Former national security adviser Susan Rice is urging the United States and China to jointly halt advanced artificial intelligence development, describing the move as a diplomatic long shot but one she believes is necessary to head off catastrophic risks.
Speaking Monday on CNN’s “OutFront,” Rice outlined what she called a “moonshot” proposal: that the leaders of both countries order their domestic AI companies to freeze development in place until a binational team of leading experts can work through the technology’s most dangerous failure modes. Breitbart News reported on her remarks.
A Call for a Joint Freeze
Rice framed the idea as a response to what she described as the unusually rapid trajectory of AI systems, which she said are improving on an exponential curve toward — and potentially beyond — human-level capability. She warned that the window to act is narrow.
“We have to deal with this threat now,” she said, adding that “in an ideal world, it would be something that the United States and China and other countries in the world would deal with together.”
The former Obama administration official said the current geopolitical climate is far from ideal for such cooperation, but argued that existential challenges rarely arrive under favorable conditions.
“There are all kinds of ways in which this is not the ideal setting, but we don’t always get to pick the ideal setting when we’re dealing with existential challenges,” Rice said.
The Risks She Cites
Rice pointed to what she called “very real and proximate risks” once AI reaches or surpasses human intelligence, a threshold she referred to as superintelligence. Among her concerns: misuse by terrorists for cyberattacks or biological weapons, which she said could be “deadly on a mass scale.”
She also raised the possibility that humans could lose control of advanced systems altogether, which she characterized as an existential threat to humanity.
“[It] could result in loss of human control and even an existential risk to humanity,” Rice said.
Her proposal would have the two governments direct their AI companies to pause frontier development until a joint “all-star team” of the world’s leading technical experts can resolve what she described as critical problems on a technical basis — both to prevent misuse and to prevent loss of human control.
A ‘Moonshot’ With Long Odds
Rice acknowledged the difficulty of the undertaking directly, calling her suggestion “a moonshot diplomatically and scientifically.” Washington and Beijing are already locked in a broad technological rivalry, with export controls, chip restrictions and competing AI investment strategies forming a central axis of the relationship.
Her comments add a prominent Democratic voice to a debate that has increasingly crossed party lines: how aggressively governments should intervene in frontier AI development. Some lawmakers and national security officials have warned that a unilateral pause by the United States would simply cede the field to China, while others argue that without coordination, both countries are racing toward shared dangers.
Rice, who served as national security adviser and U.N. ambassador under President Barack Obama, did not specify how such a freeze would be verified or enforced, nor how countries outside the U.S.-China framework would be brought into the arrangement. She also did not address how a pause would interact with the existing commercial incentives driving major AI labs in both countries.
The proposal lands amid continuing debate in Washington over AI governance, including questions about safety testing, transparency requirements and the role of federal regulators versus voluntary industry commitments. Rice’s framing — that the technology poses risks requiring near-term action rather than eventual study — echoes arguments advanced by some AI safety researchers, though the specific mechanism she proposed would represent an unprecedented level of U.S.-China coordination on a commercial technology.
Whether the idea gains any traction in either capital remains unclear. The two governments have struggled in recent years to maintain even limited channels on issues like military communication and fentanyl precursors, let alone to jointly restrain a sector both see as central to economic and strategic advantage for decades to come.
Rice’s remarks came during a television interview, not a policy announcement, and she did not indicate that any formal proposal is under consideration by either government. Still, her decision to describe the freeze concept in concrete terms — directing companies to halt development, then convening a joint expert panel — goes further than the general calls for international AI cooperation that have circulated in diplomatic and academic circles.
For now, the suggestion stands as a provocation rather than a plan: an argument from a veteran of Democratic foreign policy that the risks of unchecked AI development are severe enough to justify a level of great-power cooperation that currently appears out of reach.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2026/09/21/susan-rice-u-s-must-work-with-china-to-freeze-ai-development/