Trump hails ‘very productive’ talks with China’s Xi

United States President Donald Trump has hailed “very productive” talks with President Xi Jinping during the Chinese leader’s state visit to Washington, DC this week. Trump said the meeting, Xi’s first visit to the US in more than a decade, was productive for both the US and China, emphasising the issue of artificial intelligence (AI). That would be ‘SUPER!’ Everyone last night agreed, also,” said the US president.

Trump told the United Nations General Assembly this week that the US would rename artificial intelligence “super intelligence” in all US government documents. Trump hosted a lavish state dinner on Thursday for Xi, which included high-profile guests like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla head Elon Musk, who was seated at the main table alongside the Chinese and US presidents. Despite being locked in a fierce strategic rivalry over AI, Trump and Xi have rebuffed recent calls from inside the US tech sector to slow the pace of development over concerns about controlling the rapidly advancing technology.

On Friday, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher that creating channels of communication on AI is one of the main challenges Washington and Beijing are seeking to overcome. Separately, Greer told US media on Friday that the current talks did not cover the sale of a small amount of high-quality US-made chips requiring licences. It’s the way we stay ahead in the race for superintelligence, or AI, and so those conversations … [are] not really happening in these negotiations,” Greer ‌said.

On Friday, Trump is taking Xi to visit the National Archives, showing off the sacred texts of US democracy to the leader of the world’s most powerful communist country before his three-day visit concludes. Xi is expected to depart Washington after touring the nation’s vault of records, where the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights are held. The two leaders have made a show of working to preserve harmony between the world’s two largest economies, though there were no major breakthroughs on issues such as trade or the safety of AI.