US President Donald Trump has been blunt about his AI ambitions, as well as about who he considers the US's main rival to be: China. His Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, has not said anything so forthright - but it seems he holds a similar view. "China very much sees it as a race, they very much think China should be the leading force in AI - they see AI as a power maximiser," says Rebecca Arcesati, from the Mercator Institute for China Studies.
You can look beyond the rhetoric for evidence of this: AI has been a cornerstone of China's technological ambitions for more than a decade, whether Xi emphasises it publicly or not. For Trump, beating China to AI supremacy outweighs any risks of the technology to humans - something he has described as "a hoax". China's foreign ministry warned that "narratives of threat" and confrontation hinder global AI governance, calling for cooperation to ensure it benefits all.
It means when the two presidents sit down on Thursday there will be few more important topics than their AI ambitions - and what they say and decide will matter to the whole world. There's no doubt the US and China are global leaders in AI but who is ahead depends on how success is measured. American companies lead on so-called frontier models, with the highest-performing systems on most benchmarks coming from firms such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.
In February 2025, an AI model by China's DeepSeek "briefly matched the top US model" and as of March 2026, Anthropic's top model led the pack "by just 2.7%", according to researchers at Stanford University, external. Part of the US advantage stems from the vast sums being invested in leading AI companies as the frontier labs burn through mountains of cash to build the infrastructure to train new models. The stock market is booming and a large part of the US economy's expansion relies on the enormous growth - and projected profitability - of AI companies.
So that might partly explain why President Trump sees AI as key to US success. Another factor limiting China's ability is the sweeping government restrictions placed on US companies that prevent them from selling advanced microchips to Chinese firms - these are crucial for developing cutting-edge models. Despite the chip restrictions, new AI models are coming out almost monthly in both countries and it's unclear what "winning" the AI race would actually mean, or whether there is a finish line at all.
Many companies are racing to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical form of AI capable of learning, reasoning and performing a wide range of tasks at or above the level of humans. The Chinese AI industry has so far focused not on creating frontier models but releasing what is known as open weight models - downloadable and tweakable in a similar way to open source software. This contrasts with the approach taken by many US firms, which largely focus on proprietary models accessed through paid subscriptions or company platforms.
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