The Summit Didn't Deliver on AI. Now Diplomats Are Playing Catch-Up.

Last week's Trump-Xi summit in Beijing was billed as a historic reset. Tech CEOs flew over. Jensen Huang showed up at the last minute hoping to close a deal on Nvidia's H200 chips. Observers wanted a governance framework. What they got was a photo at the Temple of Heaven and vague language about future talks.

According to TIME's Miranda Jeyaretnam, the summit looked more "like a trade show" than a strategic technology summit — at least from the U.S. side. The real agenda, per U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who told Bloomberg on Friday, was the "three Bs" — Boeing, beef, and beans. Semiconductor export controls barely came up.

The U.S. brought the CEO of Nvidia to Beijing and chip controls weren't a major discussion point.

What's Actually Happening Now

With no AI framework coming out of Beijing, U.S. diplomats shifted gears fast. Casey K. Mace — the State Department's senior official for APEC and economic policy — told CNBC on Friday, speaking from the sidelines of APEC trade ministers' meetings in Suzhou, that the U.S. is "very active in promoting U.S. AI options and solutions" across the Asia-Pacific.

Mace said U.S. tech companies will hold workshops at an APEC "digital week" event in Chengdu in July. He declined to name which companies. He also declined to call it advocacy for "best in class" American tech over Chinese alternatives — which is a notable deflection, given that's exactly what it is.

The working-level conversations at Suzhou focused on U.S. AI applications in food traceability, genome sequencing, and biotech. Mace told CNBC the tone has been "positive," which he credited to the Trump-Xi summit — even though that summit produced no concrete AI commitments.

The Nvidia Problem Nobody's Talking About

Nvidia already has U.S. government approval to sell the H200 chip to China. The deal exists on paper. Chinese firms just aren't buying.

Why? According to TIME, the Chinese government has been actively encouraging its companies to buy from domestic chipmakers — specifically Huawei — instead of Nvidia. So American tech has the green light but not the customers. That's not an export control problem. That's a market access and industrial policy problem, and it's entirely Beijing's doing.

Huang flew to Beijing for this summit hoping to change that calculus. No deal was announced.

What Did Actually Come Out of the Summit on AI

One concrete item: China's foreign ministry confirmed that the two countries agreed to begin discussions on safe AI development. Not a framework. Not guidelines. Discussions about discussions.

According to CNBC, it's unclear when or how those talks will begin.

Brookings Institution fellows Kyle Chan and Ryan Hass — writing before the summit — laid out what a meaningful agreement could look like: nonbinding AI safety guidelines, shared protocols for detecting AI misuse by nonstate actors, and coordination on preventing AI-enabled cyberattacks and bioweapons development. Chan's argument, published May 8, was that the U.S. and China don't need strategic trust to cooperate on shared threats — they just need practical protocols.

None of that materialized. What materialized was a pledge from Xi that China won't send weapons to Iran — a geopolitical concession that has nothing to do with AI.

What the Coverage Is Getting Wrong

Most mainstream outlets framed the summit as a positive step forward on U.S.-China relations. That framing captures part of the picture but misses the larger stakes.

The AI race between these two countries is accelerating. China is building cheaper alternatives to American AI infrastructure and deploying them aggressively across Southeast Asia and the Global South. The U.S. has responded by restricting chip exports — but those restrictions haven't stopped China's progress. DeepSeek proved that point in January.

Ryan Fedasiuk, fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told CNBC: "There is pressure to distribute American compute globally." That pressure is real. If the U.S. doesn't get its AI products into Asian markets fast, China fills that space — and the countries that build their digital infrastructure on Chinese AI become structurally dependent on Beijing.

The APEC push in Suzhou and the upcoming Chengdu workshops are sensible moves. But a few workshops don't substitute for the strategic framework the summit failed to produce.

The Real Problem

The Trump administration brought a delegation of tech billionaires to Beijing, generated enormous goodwill coverage, and came home with no AI deal, no chip sale, and no governance framework. Now State Department officials are working the sidelines of trade meetings in China to sell American AI product by product.

China is the long-term technology competitor. It is actively subsidizing domestic AI, blocking American platforms, and pushing cheaper alternatives to U.S. tech across Asia. The window to lock in American AI infrastructure across the Indo-Pacific is closing.

Workshops in Chengdu are better than nothing. But the U.S. needed a deal in Beijing. It didn't get one.