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Trump and Chinese president Xi end summit without major agreement on AI
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Donald Trump and Xi Jinping ended their Washington summit on Friday without a major agreement on artificial intelligence, despite calls for the two powers to slow a destabilizing technology race. The three-day visit emphasized pageantry and personal rapport, while talks covered Iran, Ukraine, Taiwan and a two-month trade-truce extension. No joint framework was announced for AI safety, export controls or military use, leaving the world’s two largest AI powers to develop advanced systems without new bilateral guardrails.
The White House visit was Xi’s first by a Chinese president in more than a decade and only his second US state visit. Ceremonial moments included tea with Trump and a National Archives viewing of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. Trump contrasted America’s 250-year history with China’s 6,000-year history, but the symbolism produced no technical roadmap for AI cooperation.
AI nevertheless emerged as the summit’s most important unresolved issue. Xi said Washington and Beijing share a responsibility to develop and manage it for good and keep it under human control, while China targets more than 90% penetration for next-generation smart terminals and AI agents by 2030. Trump promoted “super intelligence” and said Xi appeared to like the term, but disclosed no substance.
The contrast was clearest at Thursday’s black-tie state dinner, where Trump was joined by technology leaders including Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, AMD’s Lisa Su and Apple’s Tim Cook. Chinese technology executives were absent, turning the guest list itself into a political symbol. Independent senator Bernie Sanders called the scene “a government of, by and for the billionaire class,” but no joint statement or symbolic restraint on frontier AI followed.
Representative Ro Khanna, the top Democrat on the House select committee on China, called the missed opportunity “such a layup.” He said Trump could have proposed technical working groups linking Chinese developers such as DeepSeek, Moonshot and Alibaba with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and outside researchers. The groups could have recommended limits on self-improving AI and verification rules for advanced laboratories, and Khanna believed Xi might have accepted at least their creation.
The lack of an agreement has practical consequences for technology companies, regulators and national security teams. American and Chinese firms remain locked in competition for chips, models, investment, talent and international influence, while safety standards are likely to diverge. That could complicate oversight, accelerate AI use in cybersecurity, autonomous systems, surveillance and military decision-making, and make it harder for companies to operate across both markets.
Jonathan Czin, a fellow at Brookings Institution’s China Center, said the countries missed a potentially transformative moment for technology and the world. The outlook may still include smaller confidence-building steps, such as technical talks, shared testing protocols, incident reporting and verification arrangements, even without a broad treaty. But sustained strategic rivalry could block even modest cooperation, leaving international institutions and industry to fill the governance gap as China expands adoption and the United States pursues leadership.
