AI looms large over Trump-Xi meeting amid deep distrust between US and China

When Xi Jinping, China’s leader, touches down in Maryland on Wednesday, he will step out into the arms – perhaps a hug, if Donald Trump’s wishes come true – of a US president who has shown China more bonhomie than any of his recent predecessors.

The meeting between Xi and Trump this week will be the second time that the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies have talked face to face this year. At the previous summit, held in Beijing in May, there was much talk of building a “strategic stability” between the two powers. But there was little by way of concrete outcomes: the countries remain at loggerheads over trade, export controls and geopolitics.

Despite the goodwill built in May, few anticipate any major breakthroughs this week when Xi makes his first state visit to the US since 2015. “Expectations are very low,” said Bonnie Glaser, a managing director at the US thinkthank the German Marshall Fund. “Nobody is using the term ‘deliverables’.”

One area in which Trump and Xi may reach some consensus is on artificial intelligence safety. Tech executives including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Sam Altman of ⁠OpenAI, Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk ​of ​Tesla, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jensen Huang ​of Nvidia will reportedly ​attend a ⁠state dinner at the White House on Thursday evening.

‘Whoever wins AI, wins’

In the past few weeks, the US has been beset by worries that AI is progressing too fast, but that the US must strive to defend its lead over China in the frontier technology – and Trump has pushed back hard against calls to slow its development. “We’re leading China in AI,” Trump said recently. “And frankly, I want to ⁠keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.”

On Sunday, Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, concluded talks with the Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng by proposing an AI safety mechanism to be established between Washington and Beijing. The mechanism appears to stop short of a major safety agreement.

Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, and He Lifeng, Chinese vice-premier, during trade talks in Paris, France, on 16 March. Photograph: US treasury/Reuters

Tuesday’s front page of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese communist party (CCP), ran an article saying that the US and China should “make AI a new frontier for China-US cooperation” and “make good use of the intergovernmental dialogue mechanism on AI”.

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, called on the two countries to establish a dialogue on AI similar to the communication between the US and the Soviet Union during the cold war. “Governments with the greatest AI capabilities have the greatest responsibilities to humanity, to establish channels for dialogue, transparency, trust and cooperation,” Guterres said.

Still, China does not agree with US assessments about the grave threat posed by its AI developments. China’s foreign ministry responded to an essay by Dario Amodei, the Anthropic chief executive, that called for Washington to impede Beijing’s progress, by saying “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance”.

China has already taken steps to mandate the labelling of AI-generated content, to restrict the ability of children to use AI companions and, in keeping with the CCP’s desire to keep tight control on all information, to restrict what can be said by chatbots.

China may be more concerned with what it sees as US attempts to limit is growth. Washington has for years restricted China’s ability to buy the most advanced semiconductors needed for AI development, and this year the US banned the sale of Chinese humanoid robots.

Amanda Hsiao, China director at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, said: “China doesn’t necessarily see the threat in the same way that the US does. There is a lot of distrust that’s in the way of cooperation. The Chinese are inclined to think of every US call for safety standards or calls from companies for pacing the frontier as means of suppressing Chinese development.”

Trade tensions persist

Next on the agenda will be trade. Washington and Beijing struck a temporary truce in the trade war last year at a summit in South Korea. That truce – which included a pause on tariffs, as well as an agreement for Beijing to loosen restrictions on the export of rare earths – will expire in November.

Beijing is hoping for a longer-term commitment to banish tariffs, which pose a threat to China’s export-driven economy. But reports suggest that the US is unwilling to agree to anything that would weaken its future bargaining power.

Glaser, of the German Marshall Fund, said: “The US side views this as leverage over China and ensuring that they can get deliveries of the rare earths and magnets that American companies need.”

China may not feel the need to negotiate, either. Despite the trade war, China’s exports have surged, and it is on track to reach a $1tn trade surplus for the second year running.

‘This is not a G2’

One aspect of the relationship that has shifted since May is the issue of Taiwan. After the Beijing summit, Xi secured a major concession from Trump, when he agreed to pause a $14bn package of US arms sales to Taiwan. US presidents have traditionally excluded the issue of arms sales to Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims as part of its territory, from the US-China relationship.

But Trump has described future weapons sales as a “very good negotiating chip”. The US is now reportedly considering delaying further sales until after the Apec and G20 summits later this year, where Trump and Xi are expected to meet again.

Tuesday’s People’s Daily article said that a stable China-US relationship would “bring more peace, prosperity, and progress to the world”. But for all the talk in Beijing of “strategic stability”, Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, notes that “this is not a G2” alliance of the world’s two dominant powers.

Trump and Xi Jinping tour the Forbidden City in Beijing, China, on 8 November 2017. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

“They are finding a way to manage the bilateral relationship, but they are not whatsoever working together as co-stewards of the international order,” Kennedy wrote in a recent commentary.

China is Iran’s biggest oil buyer and trading partner. After Trump launched strikes against Iran in February, China reportedly put pressure on Tehran behind the scenes to come to the negotiating table. It also slashed oil imports by nearly one-quarter in the first six months of the war, limiting global inflation.

Da Wei, a professor of international relations at Tsinghua University, wrote in a recent essay that this reflected “a more confident China” that “did not exploit the difficulties that the United States faced in the war with Iran”. But Beijing has otherwise done little to resolve the crisis in the Middle East, which it sees as being a mess of Trump’s making.

Last month, Bessent announced an “economic D-day” against Iran and its enablers. The US treasury secretary subsequently claimed to have had “very good private discussions” with Chinese officials over ending the country’s economic ties with Iran.

When it comes to Ukraine, Beijing has shown unwavering support for Moscow since Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, launched his full-scale invasion in 2022.

Ali Wyne, senior research and advocacy adviser on the US and China at the International Crisis Group, said: “The contrast between the world’s incumbent power and its principal challenger will be even sharper in Washington than it was in Beijing in May: while the former is mired once more in the Middle East and straining longstanding alliances, the latter is casting itself as a stabilizing counterweight and the leading champion of a more multipolar order.”

High vibes, low ambition

The lack of momentum on thorny geopolitical issues, combined with China’s emphasis on maintaining “strategic stability” above all else, means that few expect there to be major breakthroughs at this week’s summit.

Hsiao added: “It is going to be yet another summit that is high on positive vibes and relatively low ambition in terms of substance.”

Democrats in Washington have urged Trump to raise concerns over China’s treatment of political prisoners, but are already sounding the alarm that he could make too many concessions to Xi.

Senator Tammy Duckworth told an audience at the Center for American Progress thinktank on Tuesday: “He’s not very good at making deals with the PRC [People’s Republic of China] that they actually follow through on. If you look at the result of the last summit they had, they promised the purchase of 200 Boeing aircraft and $17bn in agricultural products. Neither one of those has come to pass.”

“At the same time, he violated our longstanding position on Taiwan by engaging in discussions on arms sales to Taiwan with President Xi,” Duckworth added. “I worry that it’s going to be a repeat of that and President Trump basically spends too much time sucking up to President Xi. He’s very distracted. When he focuses on the Indo-Pacific, it’s about him cosying up to an authoritarian regime at the expense of our friends and allies in the region.”

Additional research by Yu-chen Li