Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss his meeting with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, details of a 'U.S.-China AI Dialogue', calls for a slowdown in AI development, whether regulation is needed, Iran war latest, and more.
What Scott Bessent said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent discussed the outcomes of high-level talks with China, emphasizing the strong rapport between President Trump and Xi Jinping, which facilitated a 12-hour working session. He announced the formalization of the U.S.-China AI Dialogues, with a follow-up meeting planned in Shenzhen within two months, and the establishment of a communications and incident line. Bessent addressed tariffs, noting a focal point on suspended higher tariffs set to expire November 10, and mentioned a '30-by-30' trade deal for non-critical goods, operationalized by USTR Jamison Greer, to reduce tariffs to MFN levels. On AI, Bessent agreed with the president that AI labs must take responsibility, rejecting liability shields, and highlighted the need for incident reporting and transparency. He identified the biggest danger as lack of resiliency, praising the frontier labs as national champions and noting the potential for using bank cybersecurity knowledge.
Key takeaways
Formalized U.S.-China AI Dialogues with a follow-up meeting in Shenzhen within two months.
Discussed a 30-by-30 trade deal for non-critical goods to lower tariffs to MFN levels.
China conceded the U.S. remains in the lead in AI models.
You get to be in our fishbowl of a Nasdaq studio, which is always, always interesting. You recently held some high-level talks. What came out concrete from your discussions?
So it was all day yesterday, Joe. And I think what's important in terms of framing the talks is it all stems from the leaders' very good rapport and relationship. President Trump, Xi Jinping at the personal level have a very good relationship, and we try to bring that down to the working level. They both have great respect for each other. I think in Xi Jinping's eyes, Donald Trump is a different kind of leader than he's seen in the past. And our discussions yesterday, we talked about economics, we talked about AI. We had some deliverables that have not been completely fulfilled from our meeting in Busan, Korea, last fall. And then we started an AI dialogue, which I think is going to be very important. And again, this is possible because of the leaders' relationship. President Trump was in Beijing. I was there with him in May. Xi Jinping will be coming to Washington this week. And then there's a chance the two leaders will see each other two more times. So I think that adds great stability to the relationship. The Chinese have a phrase, 'implementing our leaders' consensus,' and they keep falling back to that. And that's true. We follow the instructions and then we get down in the details. And we spent about 12 hours yesterday doing that.
Can you give us more color on exactly how the AI discussions went? And, you know, we've even seen reports that maybe you were a little bit more cautious than the president at one time about guardrails. What type of cooperation could we expect from China and what type of guardrails? And do you trust them? Wouldn't they like us to put up guardrails and they might not put up any?
Well, I think the important thing was to start talking. So to set up the dialogue, we've now formalized something called the U.S.-China AI Dialogues. We've agreed to meet again probably in two months in Shenzhen. The second thing is we want to open a communications line and incident line so that we have constant communications, especially in the event of some kind of an incident. And then we want to start discussing protocols for what our... so both sides can agree on what the leading AI dangers are, whether it's uncontrollable agents, whether it's non-state actors and cyber non-state actors in bioweapons.
You didn't mention to the vice premier concerns about President Xi's health. Did he find... is everything fine? You saw him not too long ago, I guess. But I've just read reports. I don't know if there's any veracity, but I...
All things are going... everything's okay at this point. The president's planning on greeting him at Andrews Air Force Base, and I think we're going to have a great visit.
We'll be able to tell firsthand at that point. Can I just ask you about tariffs? You know that there are some... we suspended higher tariffs on some Chinese imports that expires November 10th. Did you talk about that at all?
10 more exchanges in this transcript
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Bessent, S. (2026, September 21). Treasury Secretary Bessent: Trump admin won't give AI leaders a 'liability shield' [Interview transcript]. CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2959923/
MLA
Scott Bessent. "Treasury Secretary Bessent: Trump admin won't give AI leaders a 'liability shield'." CNBC Television, 21 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2959923/.
BibTeX
@misc{bessent2026_2959923,
author = {Scott Bessent},
title = {Treasury Secretary Bessent: Trump admin won't give AI leaders a 'liability shield'},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2959923/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
