Trump and Xi prepare for AI summit amid deepening US-China divide

The two most powerful people on Earth are about to sit down and talk about the thing that might eventually replace them both. President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping are set to meet in Washington on September 24, with artificial intelligence dominating an agenda shaped by mutual suspicion, competing ambitions, and a shared recognition that the technology they’re racing to build could be genuinely dangerous. The summit follows a previous meeting in Beijing in May, where the two leaders discussed AI guardrails and safety protocols but walked away without a formal agreement. Round two doesn’t look much more promising. The chip gap tells the story The US currently produces over 10 million advanced AI chips annually. China manages roughly 200,000. That’s a 50-to-1 production advantage, and it frames everything about how both sides approach these negotiations. Trump has leaned into this disparity publicly, asserting that the US is “leading China… by a lot” in AI capabilities. Xi, meanwhile, has called for international cooperation and shared governance over AI technologies. Chinese officials have proposed ideas for global AI governance and attempted to initiate pre-summit discuss...