China’s leader, Xi Jinping, left Washington on Friday afternoon after a whirlwind visit to President Donald Trump’s White House. And while Trump leaned into the personal nature of the leader-to-leader relationship and showed off the White House’s renovations — some completed and some ongoing — the status of what the bilateral negotiations produced on key issues between the adversaries remained largely unknown.
“We’ve had a tremendous visit from two spectacular people. And we really enjoyed it,” the president said Friday morning, seated for tea with Xi, his wife and first lady Melania Trump.
U.S. officials signaled in public comments a breakthrough on some tariff relief between the two countries and Chinese agricultural purchases, which they expect to announce next week. It’s confirmation that the central focus of the U.S.-China relationship continues to be trade.
“When the president visited China in May, we agreed on the vision of building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability. This time, we’ve agreed to add new substance to it,” Xi said through an interpreter. Trump later added that America’s farmers will be “very happy.”
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The president confirmed that he and Xi discussed Iran, as China continues to support Tehran.
But artificial intelligence and whether the U.S. would push China to address the growing safety concerns loomed over the anticipated meeting. Now at the end of Xi’s visit, few details have emerged from either side. And the dearth of information is unlikely to silence the president’s critics and could disappoint Trump’s allies who seek stronger federal regulations — and were hoping Trump would push China on it, too.
Trump said he and Xi spoke about the subject in a “very productive meeting,” but summarized the conversation in superficial terms.
“He seemed to like calling the poorly and inaccurately named Artificial Intelligence to a far more accurate and important name, SUPER INTELLIGENCE,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post.
There is a reason for the emphasis on personal touch over substance, said Sara Schuman, a former senior U.S. negotiator for China trade and managing director at Beacon Global Strategies.
“The relationship between the two is still in a competitive mode. And Trump views himself as a backstop to managing the tensions,” Schuman said.
Few former or current officials and experts who The Washington Sun spoke to expected a major breakthrough on the issue. But fanning out on cable television, Trump officials highlighted the establishment of a “dialogue” between the two countries, a proposal that was announced days before the official meetings started, as the summit’s most tangible result.
“What we talked about is developing a dialogue,” David Perdue, the U.S. ambassador to China, said in an interview Friday morning on CNBC. “We reaffirmed that here. We’ve established this dialogue and also a crisis mechanism between the two countries … That’s historic.”
That dialogue will be managed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, among others.
The Trump administration sought to tamp down expectations of breakthroughs on the AI conversations ahead of and during the talks. Bessent, who has taken a leading role on AI for the administration, told Fox News on Wednesday that the U.S. would “define with them what we think the most important or the most perilous risk factors are.” While the president cautioned in a Thursday social media post that “Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is,” he added that the only guardrail will be the Justice Department, though it’s unclear how it would regulate the growing industry.
The president is expected to meet with major tech companies, alongside House Speaker Mike Johnson, next week to discuss the way forward.
Trump’s resistance to calls for more dramatic regulation of AI is an aim to keep America’s AI capabilities superior to China’s, according to sources familiar with the White House’s thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations.
“They want to see the U.S. [as] the global leader in AI,” an industry source familiar with the administration’s AI priorities told The Sun. But how the country maintains that edge — including innovating with the fastest chip processors and physical hardware for AI models — in a way that satisfies critics remains unclear. “What regulatory regime is necessary to achieve it?” the source asked.
And there’s concern within the White House, according to sources familiar with discussions, that if the U.S. slowed down its AI development and elicited from the Chinese an agreement to do the same, the Chinese couldn’t be counted on to follow through.
While Xi talked on Thursday about managing AI development responsibly, a gulf exists between the approaches of China’s AI leaders and American companies that’s rooted in a disagreement about the severity of risk posed by unchecked AI innovation.
American AI leaders have increasingly warned the American public about the dangers of rapid AI breakthroughs. The idea that AI might pose an existential threat to mankind is less of a topic among Chinese policymakers, said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center.
“There is a gap in perceived risks of AI, and there’s a big gap between the U.S. AI industry and what we’ve now seen recently with the fears that AI could kill us all in the next decade, and a lot of views in China,” Chan said. “Ironically, their views actually kind of match up a little bit more with Trump’s.”
Trump’s more laissez-faire approach has maintained tension between some industry figures and the president about how best to balance innovation with regulation, as well as within the administration itself. While Trump remained firm on his pledge not to stifle AI, White House aides were prepared to confront Beijing over the alleged theft of U.S. AI models by Chinese companies — though by the time Xi departed, it was unclear if that confrontation happened.
Those following this issue closely say there is a lack of understanding and consensus from the White House and Congress on the goals for AI regulation, and without that, it’s difficult to make uniform demands from China.
“You gotta start somewhere,” said a former Trump official, who specialized in China trade. “I do think eventually there will be agreements around it, but this will be the first conversation. I don’t know if it’s gonna be that useful a conversation because I don’t think [regulations] have been worked up in a way that would allow each side to develop a clear position.”
A second former Trump official said ahead of the summit that they were watching to see “any potential relaxation of export controls,” specifically around chips, as the real barometer of progress.
“I think the degree to which there are any potential relaxation of export controls coming out of the meeting will be a real sign as to whether or not there’s been any meaningful discussion on that topic,” said the official.
Greer poured cold water on that notion in a Friday interview with CNBC. The chips, which Greer called “the crown jewels of American technology,” haven’t been part of the trade negotiations.
“It’s the way we stay ahead in the race for, you know, superintelligence or AI, and so those conversations actually — they’re not really happening in these negotiations,” Greer said. “All those export controls that are national security issues, we take those off the table.”
And as with most policy debates, Trump’s whims guide the ultimate outcomes.
“What we’ve experienced is that policy runs through the White House,” the industry source said. “Different parts of government have different points of view — predictably, because they’ve got different responsibilities — and then it’s the Oval Office synthesizing that and giving guidance.”
Trump, Xi and their respective delegations could have two more chances this year to deepen discussions on AI, as Trump is expected to visit China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Meeting in November and Xi is expected to return to the U.S. for December’s G20 summit, which will be hosted at one of Trump’s Florida properties. Still, it’s unclear to many when and if the two superpowers can find a reasonable solution on AI as China races to supersede the U.S. as the premier world power — a push that is, in some ways, powered by its technological innovation.
“[The] Chinese government will have their own definition of ‘responsible,’” the industry source said, calling the continued dialogue between the nations “in and of itself, a victory.”
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