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Khushboo Razdan

William Zheng

Dewey Sim

Rising tensions over artificial intelligence are shaping the final preparations for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States.
Washington and Beijing are discussing the possibility of folding a long-awaited AI dialogue into a broader economic meeting in the days before Xi meets US President Donald Trump, according to several people familiar with the arrangements.
The two leaders agreed in Beijing in May to launch an intergovernmental dialogue on AI. For months, that channel was treated separately from the trade talks led by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng, with both sides struggling to make progress in the dialogue.
Sources now say Bessent is expected to handle the two issues in one meeting. Bessent is the American lead on both the AI talks with Beijing and the economic talks. The sources said that holding a second high-level meeting so close to the summit was becoming difficult to arrange.
Development of AI in China has always been part of He’s portfolio, as the Chinese vice-premier is in charge of the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s powerful economic planning agency overseeing industrial development in the country, including AI.
The arrangements are similar to the ones in May, when Bessent and He met in Seoul days before Trump sat down with Xi in Beijing.




Officials have not confirmed the exact date or venue for the coming session, but it could happen just days ahead of the Xi-Trump handshake.
A person familiar with the discussions said He and Bessent were likely to cover all three economic initiatives: the Board of Trade, the Board of Investment and an AI working group, though only the Board of Trade was expected to yield a deliverable in time for the summit.
Beijing and Washington have invested heavily in making the reciprocal visit happen.
According to another person familiar with the discussions, officials on each side say “strategic stability benefits both sides and will be better defined by this visit” and both sides see it as an important opportunity before major political events in both countries: US midterm elections for Trump, and for Xi, a Communist Party plenum next month and a party congress next year.
Both sides were trying to “manage expectations and clarify red lines periodically”, the person said, as competition between the two countries, especially in AI, was “very intense”.
Trump and Xi were described as “having to manage opposition inside their own systems to ensure the visit does not go off course”, the person added.
The decision to hold the AI conversation in the Bessent-He session is being presented in private as a scheduling fix. It would take place in a harsher political climate than when the AI dialogue was first proposed.
Several people following the talks said the concern was that a stand-alone dialogue could shift away from risk reduction and towards semiconductor chips, model access and export controls.
One person said the Chinese side was unhappy with how the US was approaching the AI dialogue, viewing American requests as aimed at limiting harmful outcomes from AI as well as constraining China’s ability to develop its own capabilities.
One person familiar with the Chinese assessment of the process said a combined session was understandable on logistics alone.
Beijing was not given a clear picture of which US agencies would sit on the American side of an AI table until late July, the person said, and with Bessent leading that track as well as trade, asking him to appear twice so close to the leaders’ meeting created an obvious clash.
Another source said the AI file now spanned semiconductor controls, distillation and intellectual property, safety rules, cybersecurity and military constraints.

With such a broad spectrum and amid divergent expectations, they did not expect much from this round. AI security, they said, was the one area where some overlap looked possible.
Such is the context in which American AI companies have been “aggressively lobbying” the White House for a harder line, according to a person following the talks, while the Chinese side was expected to resist any US attempt to “impose a global ban on Chinese AI models”.
Earlier this week, Bessent warned that “nothing else would matter” if China pulled ahead in AI. That same day, American agencies accused six Chinese firms, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Alibaba, of industrial-scale distillation of frontier US models since late 2024, likely with “Chinese government awareness”.
On Thursday, US-based Anthropic alleged Alibaba alone ran more than 151 million Claude exchanges between May and July, while Moonshot and DeepSeek routed tens of millions more queries, in some cases exposing sensitive military and government data.
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Beijing rejected the claims, calling them groundless and accusing Washington of trying to suppress competition. Beijing said it was still willing to hold “constructive and professional discussions” under the dialogue as the two leaders agreed in May.
According to Sourabh Gupta of the Institute for China-America Studies, the wide range of issues in the AI file suggested the track should ideally run in parallel to, but separately from, the broader trade, technology and economy channel.
“[If He] is indeed Bessent’s counterpart on the AI track, it makes more sense to conduct the AI conversation at the same time and venue as the broader trade, tech and economy discussion without necessarily merging the two tracks together,” Gupta said.
Denis Simon of the Quincy Institute, a Washington think tank, said that if the AI discussion was folded into the Bessent-He economic track, “it would constitute a modest downgrade in institutional status but not necessarily a substantive abandonment of AI risk reduction”.
Simon said that a stand-alone AI session would give officials a protected block of time for issues that rarely survived a ministerial agenda: military applications, autonomous cyber operations, accident notification, frontier model evaluation, and the relationship between AI and nuclear command and control.
Folded into a Bessent-He economic meeting, AI would compete with tariffs, overcapacity, rare earths, farm purchases, investment rules and summit deliverables, he added.
“Those issues are politically immediate and economically quantifiable,” Simon said, adding that “nuclear AI risk reduction is neither. In bureaucratic terms, it is therefore especially vulnerable to being pushed towards the end of the agenda”.
Bessent himself had simultaneously cast AI as something Trump and Xi should discuss, he said, “but that does not make Treasury the natural institution for sustained military AI or nuclear command discussions”.


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Chinese side is said to view US requests as limiting both harmful outcomes from AI and Beijing’s ability to develop its own capabilities


Chinese side is said to view US requests as limiting both harmful outcomes from AI and Beijing’s ability to develop its own capabilities.


.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Chinese side is said to view US requests as limiting both harmful outcomes from AI and Beijing’s ability to develop its own capabilities

Chinese side is said to view US requests as limiting both harmful outcomes from AI and Beijing’s ability to develop its own capabilities