Trump and Xi Won’t Find Common Ground on AI Safety

U.S.-China Summit: Why Trump and Xi Won't Cooperate on AI Safety

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China Brief:

Trump and Xi Won’t Find Common Ground on AI Safety

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China Brief

A weekly digest of the stories you should be following in China, plus exclusive analysis. Delivered Tuesday.

Trump and Xi Won’t Find Common Ground on AI Safety

The leaders have fundamentally different ideas about the technology and how to regulate it.

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*Palmer-James-foreign-policy-columnist20*

*James Palmer*

By **James Palmer**, a deputy editor at *Foreign Policy*.

!U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping pose for photos at Zhongnanhai Garden in Beijing.

*U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping pose for photos at Zhongnanhai Garden in Beijing.*

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping pose for photos at Zhongnanhai Garden in Beijing on May 15. Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images

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September 15, 2026, 5:35 PM

Welcome to*Foreign Policy*’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: Prospects for **AI safety measures** appear dim ahead of the U.S.-China summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the **BRICS summit** in India, and China moves to replenish its **oil stockpiles**.

Welcome to*Foreign Policy*’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: Prospects for **AI safety measures** appear dim ahead of the U.S.-China summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the **BRICS summit** in India, and China moves to replenish its **oil stockpiles**.

Sign up to receive China Brief in your inbox every Tuesday.

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Can the U.S. and China Cooperate on AI Safety?

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet in Washington on Sept. 24, and artificial intelligence safety is likely high on the agenda.

Many analysts hope that China and the United States might cooperate to set basic international principles for governing the technology despite their geopolitical rivalry—much as the Soviet Union and United States ultimately cooperated during the Cold War on nuclear arms control, polio eradication, and protecting the ozone layer.

China has reportedly threatened to cancel the summit if the United States goes ahead with arms sales to Taiwan beforehand, but that sounds like routine diplomatic noise to me. Even if the meeting goes ahead, the chances of productive alignment on AI safety are low.

As I wrote last month, the two countries have fundamentally different understandings of AI risk. While the U.S. tech elite is preoccupied with sci-fi scenarios involving singularity and machine gods, Chinese bureaucrats operate within a tradition of cybernetics that is more concerned with technical failures and the political and economic consequences of new technologies.

Simply put, if you think the central AI problem is “control the emergence of superintelligence,” your approach will differ from someone whose concern is “prevent AI from worsening youth unemployment.”

In theory, there are still shared problems that Beijing and Washington could address at the summit, particularly in the wake of the OpenAI-Hugging Face security breach. As much as the Chinese internet is cut off from the wider world, it still depends on many of the same systems and crumbling infrastructure as the United States.

Still, another issue is that the United States and China have mismatched regulatory capacities, making it unlikely that they could impose shared standards. For better or worse, China exercises tight control over its tech sector. That has included massive fines, canceled IPOs, ideological restrictions, and pressure on executives to demonstrate political loyalty or face imprisonment.

The U.S. tech sector, by contrast, has numerous ways to resist regulation, from lobbying to legal challenges to seemingly bribing the president. Regulation would also require new legislation—an unlikely prospect in a deeply divided Congress.

Chinese leaders, who can change regulations largely at their whim, often struggle to understand these limits and might interpret any discrepancy between promises of regulation and legal reality as a sign of U.S. unreliability or dishonesty, which could scuttle further progress.

The White House has made very clear its hostility to AI regulation. On Monday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” He doubled down on the false narrative blaming China for public opposition to AI and data centers, calling it a “sick conspiracy.”

The sudden return to anti-China rhetoric is an about-face for Trump, who has been reluctant to publicly criticize Beijing, even as other Republican politicians have indulged in plenty of China bashing.

Trump might believe that he can spread anti-China narratives at home and still cooperate with Beijing where it serves him, but Chinese leaders may not be so keen. That was evident this weekend, when Chen Yixin, the head of China’s state security ministry, wrote in an article that U.S. AI models are part of a “propaganda war and a cognitive war” against China.

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What We’re Following

**Xi attends BRICS summit.** Xi made a flying visit to India over the weekend to attend the BRICS leaders’ summit. Though Xi stayed for only one day, the visit signaled a degree of reconciliation between Beijing