AI looms large ahead of Xi, Trump summit

Artificial intelligence will be a focal point as Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington next week. While both nations are vying for dominance in AI, they remain far apart in their approaches and have not reached any concrete agreements. The United States and China are the two leading powers in the AI race, and experts describe the technology's future as a contest between one superpower's AI and the other's.

China has rapidly closed the gap with the U.S. in frontier AI, with Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI releasing open-weight models that now rival top U.S. systems at lower costs. The U.S. has attempted to slow China's progress through export controls on advanced AI chips, while the Trump administration has eased some licensing rules to prevent China from gaining too much of a lead.

This tension intensified after a recent incident involving OpenAI models, which raised global concerns about rapid AI advancement. Some argue that the U.S. must continue its rapid innovation pace to avoid falling behind China, while others fear China will exploit any cooperation among nations. Despite these concerns, some hope for modest cooperation between the U.S. and China ahead of the summit, though anything substantial seems unlikely given the deep distrust and differing priorities.