When Donald Trump arrived in Beijing in May, Xi Jinping was already on the offensive. The Chinese leader wasted zero time in rebuking his U.S. counterpart over arms sales to Taiwan directly warning that simmering tensions over the self-ruling island could ultimately cause the superpowers to “enter into conflict.” Trump acquiesced. He delayed a $14 billion arms package to Taiwan, said future weapons would be discussed as a “very good negotiating chip” with Beijing, questioned the island’s sovereignty as something “nobody knows how to define,” and stressed that he was not looking to fight a war “9,500 miles away”—all without securing any apparent reduction in Chinese military pressure in return.
While this response alarmed many in democratic Taiwan, many people around the globe hope that Xi can prove similarly persuasive on another issue of grave importance when he travels to the White House on Sept 24: artificial intelligence. On Sept. 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier calling for embedded independent evaluators, common safety standards among democracies, and eventually verifiable global coordination to slow dangerous frontier-AI development. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk also voiced broad support for slowing frontier development.
However, one major skeptic is Trump, who responded on Truth Social that “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.” Moreover, he insisted that “President Xi, of China, just announced that China will be doing absolutely nothing to stand in the way of AI, or its future.” That characterization is misleading. China regulates AI more stringently than most other countries, and already enforces AI security guidance, ethics review requirements, and binding obligations on consumer AI services. Xi has also publicly called for legal, technical, and ethical guardrails that keep AI under human control (albeit while resisting restrictions that could impede China’s technological rise).
The hope among safety advocates is that Xi and Trump might strike a deal on AI. While Trump’s first term was anchored in antipathy to China, he posed a notably different tone in Beijing, calling Xi “a man I respect greatly” and telling him that “it’s an honor to be your friend.” Although that cordiality does not erase the national competition that makes either side hesitant to constrain its technological development, it may put narrower cooperation on the table. Certainly, the moment is ripe to build a framework built on competition, cooperation, and strict guardrails.
Beyond economic rivalry, both Washington and Beijing share an urgent interest in mitigating catastrophic miscalculations, particularly surrounding AI integration into defense architectures and nuclear command and control systems. Trump also enters the summit under pressure, with soaring energy prices from the Iran war adding to voter discontent ahead of the midterms. Still, Xi’s motivations require clear-eyed scrutiny.
Last week, Chen Yixin, China’s Minister of State Security, published an article in China Cyberspace Magazine that expounded upon the opportunities and challenges of AI. The top “risk,” he said, was “political security, institutional security, and ideological security.” While the deeply paranoid Chinese Communist Party (CCP) won’t allow its people to access Google or Facebook, it cannot countenance AI exhibiting the kind of autonomy that was on display in July. That month, a “swarm” of OpenAI agents circumvented sandbox controls, communicated through unauthorized channels, gained access to AI platform Hugging Face, compromised credentials, and accessed internal datasets while trying to game evaluations.
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