When Xi Jinping, China’s leader, touches down in Maryland on Wednesday, he will step out into the arms – perhaps a hug, if Donald Trump’s wishes come true – of a US president who has shown China more bonhomie than any of his recent predecessors. The meeting between Xi and Trump this week will be the second time that the leaders of the world’s two biggest economies have talked face to face this year. At the previous summit, held in Beijing in May, there was much talk of building a “strategic stability” between the two powers.
But there was little by way of concrete outcomes: the countries remain at loggerheads over trade, export controls and geopolitics. Despite the goodwill built in May, few anticipate any major breakthroughs this week when Xi makes his first state visit to the US since 2015. Tech executives including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jensen Huang of Nvidia will reportedly attend a state dinner at the White House on Thursday evening.
In the past few weeks, the US has been beset by worries that AI is progressing too fast, but that the US must strive to defend its lead over China in the frontier technology – and Trump has pushed back hard against calls to slow its development. The mechanism appears to stop short of a major safety agreement. Tuesday’s front page of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese communist party (CCP), ran an article saying that the US and China should “make AI a new frontier for China-US cooperation” and “make good use of the intergovernmental dialogue mechanism on AI”.
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, called on the two countries to establish a dialogue on AI similar to the communication between the US and the Soviet Union during the cold war. Still, China does not agree with US assessments about the grave threat posed by its AI developments. China’s foreign ministry responded to an essay by Dario Amodei, the Anthropic chief executive, that called for Washington to impede Beijing’s progress, by saying “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance”.
China has already taken steps to mandate the labelling of AI-generated content, to restrict the ability of children to use AI companions and, in keeping with the CCP’s desire to keep tight control on all information, to restrict what can be said by chatbots. China may be more concerned with what it sees as US attempts to limit is growth. Washington has for years restricted China’s ability to buy the most advanced semiconductors needed for AI development, and this year the US banned the sale of Chinese humanoid robots.
Amanda Hsiao, China director at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, said: “China doesn’t necessarily see the threat in the same way that the US does. There is a lot of distrust that’s in the way of cooperation. The Chinese are inclined to think of every US call for safety standards or calls from companies for pacing the frontier as means of suppressing Chinese development.” Next on the agenda will be trade.
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