The Trump-Xi summit in Beijing this week focused primarily on trade deals rather than AI governance, with semiconductor chip export controls described as a minor topic in the talks. The meeting took place amid escalating U.S.-China AI competition, including White House accusations of Chinese AI theft and bipartisan congressional concerns over potential Nvidia chip sales to China. 

Beijing also reportedly moved last month to block Meta from acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based, Chinese-founded AI startup, even though Xi told the U.S. delegation of business executives at the summit that China was open for business.

“An opening chapter of an A.I. cold war is emerging,” Yingyi Ma, professor of sociology, wrote ahead of the summit in a Brookings Institution commentary piece titled “What will happen when Trump meets Xi? - A blind spot in U.S. AI policy.” “Beijing’s decision to block the Manus acquisition is instructive because it reveals what matters most to China: keeping its frontier AI talent at home. The White House, by contrast, remains focused on distillation and chip controls—symptoms of a competition but not the root of it.”

Read more in the TIME article, “How A.I. Was the Elephant in the Room at the Trump-Xi Summit.”