China and US voice shared fears over AI military risks at Beijing security conference

The world’s two largest military powers don’t agree on much these days. But at the 13th Beijing Xiangshan Forum in September 2026, American and Chinese defense experts found common ground on at least one point: unchecked AI development is making the world more dangerous, and nobody has a great plan to stop it. Around 2,000 delegates from roughly 100 countries convened at China’s flagship security conference, where the central theme wasn’t a new weapons system or a territorial dispute. It was the creeping role of artificial intelligence in military operations, and the growing risk that algorithms could one day make life-or-death decisions faster than any human can intervene. When minutes replace hours The most sobering discussion at the forum centered on how AI is compressing military decision-making timelines. Where commanders once had hours or days to assess threats and formulate responses, AI-enabled systems could shrink that window to minutes. Melanie Sisson of the Brookings Institution and Tianjiao Jiang of Fudan University both pushed for strong guardrails, including explicit human oversight requirements for any military AI system involved in critical decisions. Their proposed...