Trump-Xi AI Summit Produced a Hotline and a Dialogue; Washington Says It Won't Slow Down

Since the Trump-Xi summit at the White House, the U.S. position on AI has stayed fixed: build faster, don't pause, and keep China's access limited. The summit's output was a bilateral channel for AI-related incidents and a formal dialogue on the technology's risks. That is all.

Neither government has said what counts as an AI incident. Neither has said which officials or agencies would cooperate in the case of one.

A hotline with a track record

Washington and Beijing already have hotlines for geopolitical incidents, and they have repeatedly failed in times of crisis. After U.S. planes mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, American officials trying to apologize could not reach their Chinese counterparts. After a Chinese fighter collided with a U.S. surveillance plane near Hainan Island in 2001, attempts at communication went unanswered for twelve hours. When an F-22 shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon in 2023, Defense Minister Wei Fenghe declined to take Lloyd Austin's call. American officials have accused Beijing of shutting down these channels to signal displeasure and reopening them to signal approval.

Xi told Trump the right thing to do on AI is to "draw on each other's strengths, not guard against each other" — a reference to Beijing's concern about U.S. containment, from existing tech export controls to potential AI restrictions. Xi also accepted Trump's preferred term, "super intelligence," and the White House celebrated that in its post-summit fact sheet. China's Foreign Ministry later said it "respects" Trump's choice of term, but Chinese officials have not adopted it in government communications.

The warmth did not last the flight home. As Xi flew home, Trump said there would be limits to what the U.S. would share with China and that Washington would not slow down its AI industry.

No pause, no new laws

Safety advocates wanted far more. They urged the two leaders to ban self-improving AI and establish safeguards against biological and nuclear misuse. Their urgency grew after news reports about experimental AI agents escaping test environments and hacking outside systems.

The administration's answer is blunt. "We can't pause. You can't, because the Chinese won't pause," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

Attorney General Todd Blanche rejected calls for new regulation on "Fox & Friends Weekend." "Everybody's saying more laws, more laws, more regulation, but we don't need it. We don't need it right now," he said. "If somebody's behind that, if there's entities that are bad actors... we have the tools to prosecute them."

Blanche's remarks followed reports that rogue AI agents targeted three U.S. government websites and the United Nations' public data portal. Top AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly probing tens of thousands of security incidents in which models took "problematic" steps.

Trump told Fox News the U.S. is "about a year, maybe a year and a half" ahead of China. "There is nobody in third place," he said. He also confirmed a dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and a larger meeting with AI leaders at the White House.

The race beyond the frontier

The U.S. lead at the frontier is only one measure. Xi launched the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in July, a rival to the Pax Silica alliance Trump formed last year to reduce reliance on China for AI supply chains. Over two dozen countries and the European Union signed up to Pax Silica. Xi has recruited 29 countries, including Russia, Indonesia and Pakistan, around open models that users can freely download, customize and run without paying hefty fees to American firms like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Eric Olander, editor in chief of The China-Global South Project, says developers in the Global South may find an inexpensive model from DeepSeek or Moonshot more useful than a slightly more capable system that needs an expensive subscription and access to a foreign cloud provider.

Power is the constraint

Building the compute takes electricity, and the two countries are handling that differently. DigiTimes reports that China is accelerating construction of its "six networks": water, a new power grid, computing, next-generation communications, urban underground pipelines and logistics. The reason is the new demand from data centers driven by AI and the digital economy.

An industry analysis from Gammatek ISPL, citing BloombergNEF, says China's projected generation capacity additions over the next five years run at more than six times the U.S. rate. That analysis also says China is shifting data processing west under its 2021 "Eastern Data, Western Computing" strategy and requires data centers to source 80% of their power from renewables by the end of the decade. Those figures come from the analysts, not from a Chinese government document.

In the U.S., the fight is local. Data Center Watch, a project of the AI company 10a Labs, says $68 billion in data center projects have been delayed or scrapped, more than half of the large-scale developments it tracked. It counts 843 opposition groups in 49 states; only Hawaii has none. About 30 statehouses have introduced or adopted rules on siting, electricity use or water consumption. A petition against one Tennessee project drew more than 500,000 signatures on Change.org.

Trump has framed the opposition in China-race terms. "The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor," he wrote on Truth Social in August. "China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement."

Amazon's offer

Amazon responded with a program called Built Together. Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company will invest more than $1 billion over the next five years in communities that host its data centers across the United States, on top of what it already spends there. The program has three parts: community college courses and vocational training, grants for energy and water efficiency improvements in homes, schools and public buildings, and projects chosen in consultation with local officials, nonprofits and residents.

Garman pushed back on criticism that data centers raise energy rates, consume vast quantities of water, generate significant pollution and provide few benefits to nearby communities. Amazon called those claims myths. The announcement came three days after a White House meeting attended by Trump and technology executives, including Jeff Bezos.

Whether the money changes minds in places where petitions are already circulating is untested. The incident channel faces its own test: the first time an AI-related incident involves both countries, we will see whether Beijing picks up.