Trump and Xi End Washington Summit Without Major AI Agreement

The two leaders discussed the wars in Iran and Ukraine and the status of Taiwan, but their biggest policy announcement was a modest two-month extension of a trade truce. Despite the presence of top technology executives at a White House state dinner on Thursday night, Trump and Xi failed to deliver the AI breakthrough that some experts and foreign governments had hoped for amid warnings that the technology could pose an existential threat to humanity.

Representative Ro Khanna, the top Democrat on the House select committee on China, criticized the outcome. "It was such a layup," Khanna said, according to The Guardian. He said Trump could have announced technical working groups and a framework calling on DeepSeek, Moonshot and Alibaba to sit down with Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini, with a commitment to at least pause any self-improving AI. "I believe Xi Jinping would have agreed to some of at least the technical working groups. But he didn't want to; he has no interest in doing that," Khanna said.

The summit was the first visit to the White House by a Chinese president in more than a decade and Xi's second state visit to the United States. It culminated on Friday with Trump and Xi drinking tea. Trump said the summit had produced great strides and that "our farmers are going to be happy," but he did not provide details.

The pair then went to the National Archives, where they looked at the original Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Trump told reporters they were comparing China's documents to America's founding documents. "Ours goes 250 years, which is great, and we're proud of. Theirs goes 6,000 years. So there's a little difference between 6,000 and 250. But we're very proud of our 250," he said.

On Thursday, Xi acknowledged that the US and China have the "responsibility to develop and manage AI for good" and "ensure that the development of AI is always under human control." China aims to have next-generation smart terminals and AI agents reach more than 90% penetration by 2030. Trump, who has repeatedly said the US must forge ahead to maintain its lead over China, appeared more focused on his push to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence." He later claimed on social media that Xi "seems to like" the term without divulging the substance of their discussions.

Later, Trump hosted a black-tie state dinner attended by technology industry figures. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders used social media to label a photo of Trump and Xi's table with guests' net worth: Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla ($928bn), Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices ($3.5bn), Jensen Huang of Nvidia ($186bn) and Tim Cook of Apple ($3.1bn). Sanders commented: "A government of, by and for the billionaire class." Their counterparts in the Chinese tech industry were not present, and there was little sign of either country making even a symbolic gesture to apply the brakes.

Khanna said Trump did not need a groundbreaking treaty like Reagan and Gorbachev reached on nuclear weapons. "He could have at least said, look, we're going to have a working group of Chinese and American technologists working together to make recommendations and enforcement and verification of the labs," he said.

Jonathan Czin, a fellow in the China Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington, agreed that an opportunity was missed. "We are in this potentially transformative moment for both countries and for the world and for technology and, instead of having a meeting that would meet the moment, you got theatre of the absurd in lieu of that," he said. "Even going into this meeting, you're dealing with a septuagenarian and octogenarian who may or may not have ever had first-hand contact with actually using AI and what happens with this technology rests on their two shoulders. The only thing they seemed to agree about is that neither of them wants to slow down with this technology, regardless of their actual understanding of it."

The state visit also underlined the contrast between Trump's treatment of democratic allies such as Canada and authoritarian rivals such as China. He broke from tradition to give Xi a red carpet welcome when Xi landed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. He also showed Xi around the White House, including a gallery wall of presidents where Joe Biden is mockingly depicted as an autopen, a construction site for his White House ballroom and a new helicopter landing pad.