On the South Lawn, a Marine One tour is about to start, and the helipad Trump had finished in time for the visit is the main exhibit. Earlier, in the Oval Office, Xi Jinping did something his host had avoided. He put artificial intelligence first on the list of things the two countries needed to talk about.
“Both China and the United States are leading nations in artificial intelligence,” Xi said on Thursday, September 24. “We have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good, and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control, and serves the well-being of the people.”
Trump leaves it where it is
Trump had set the tone that morning on social media. “Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is,” he wrote. “That is China’s position also. Our guardrail is the DOJ!” Standing on the White House grounds, he gave AI only a passing nod, saying the decisions made now “can promote peace and prosperity for decades and decades to come.”
Lawmakers and industry leaders had urged him to use the summit to pursue a safety framework. A U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times that Xi’s words reflect rising worry inside China over whether either government can contain a technology with such transformative potential.
Expectations were low. “Given Trump’s statements going into the summit about not wanting guardrails, I have tepid expectations about tangible outcomes,” said Aalok Mehta of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The likeliest result, he said, is a hotline, and its worth depends on who staffs it.
What finance ministers had already agreed
Earlier in the week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met his Chinese counterpart on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, mostly to discuss AI. “We’ve agreed to meet again,” Bessent said on Monday, describing a mechanism to be called the U.S.-China AI Dialogue. The U.S. has proposed a notification mechanism for AI incidents between the two countries, he said, along with a shared vision of common goals and common threats.
Anthropic and OpenAI are widely seen as building the most advanced models anywhere. Both have started using their best systems to train the next generation, a process known as recursive self-improvement. Leaders at both companies have urged Beijing and Washington to cooperate.
Pomp, and not much else
Xi also said the two countries “stand to gain from cooperation, and will both lose in confrontation.” Competition, he added, “should be a healthy one, and should be kept within bounds.” He repeated his warning that the “Thucydides trap” can be overcome, and called for regular dialogue between the two militaries.
The Associated Press noted that Xi’s concerns outweighed Trump’s on the issue. After about 90 minutes of talks the leaders stepped outside for the helicopter tour, and Xi left shortly after, returning in the evening for a black-tie state dinner for 130 guests. Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang and Elon Musk were on the list. No Chinese chief executives were.
Danny Russel, a former State Department official now at the Asia Society Policy Institute, had a name for it. “What we’re seeing isn’t diplomacy so much as ‘diplotainment,’” he said, adding that it would do little to solve the serious problems between the two countries.
Xi also pressed Trump on Taiwan during their private talks, and the two sides had agreed on Wednesday to extend a trade truce by two months from its November 10 expiry.
Sources
- Xi, in lavish Trump summit, urges 'human control' over AI – Los Angeles Times
- Trump lays out the pomp for Xi but says little about the significant tensions in US-China relations – Newsday
