resident Donald Trump’s entourage of tech and business leaders should have placed artificial intelligence at the center of his highly-anticipated summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing this week. But the leaders appeared to focus more on limited questions of trade, without reaching any agreement on the future of A.I.
A lot seemed to be on the table for A.I. The talks, which concluded on Friday, took place against the backdrop of a global A.I. race that has been dominated by the two superpowers. Democratic lawmakers have raised the alarm on allowing Chinese firms to buy A.I. chips from the U.S., and the White House has in recent days accused China of mass A.I. theft. At the same time, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who joined Trump on the trip at the last minute, was hoping to secure a deal to sell China Nvidia’s H200 chip, which has not been delivered to China despite U.S. approval for its sale. Chinese firms have dragged their feet in purchasing the chips after the Chinese government encouraged them to turn to domestic chipmakers like Huawei.
Several observers had also hoped that the talks would produce a broader framework on A.I. governance or U.S.-China technological cooperation.
But the talks looked more “like a trade show” especially from the U.S. side, says Chong Ja Ian, a professor of international relations at the National University of Singapore. Any deals to come out of it are expected to focus on the “three Bs”—Boeing, beef, and beans—which the U.S. wants China to purchase more of. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Bloomberg on Friday that U.S. export controls on semiconductor chips were not a major part of the talks.
https://time.com/article/2026/05/15/trump-xi-us-china-summit-ai-semiconductor-chips/
