AI Takes Centre Stage as Trump and Xi Clash Over Guardrails at White House
Trump and Xi staked out opposing positions on AI governance during a White House state visit, as the technology sits at the heart of US-China rivalry.
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping set out sharply contrasting visions for artificial intelligence during a state visit at the White House on Thursday, underscoring how the technology has become central to the rivalry between the two powers.
In his opening address, Xi said both countries bear a responsibility to keep AI development under human oversight. He said they had the capability and the duty to develop and manage AI for good, ensuring it always remains under human control and serves people's wellbeing.
Trump, by contrast, signalled he would not pursue negotiated limits. In a social media post, he said superintelligence would be a major topic of discussion with Xi but that he wanted to leave things exactly where they are, adding that this was also China's position. He described the Department of Justice as the guardrail.
The exchange followed Trump's dismissal of warnings that AI could destroy the world, which he called a hoax, and his remarks at the UN General Assembly that his administration would encourage superintelligence while the US leads the world in it safely and responsibly.
The two leaders' positions reflect a wider split in the industry. Some executives, including Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk, have called for a coordinated slowdown in developing increasingly powerful systems. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has favoured market-led safeguards, while Nvidia's Jensen Huang has questioned the need for new regulations.
Speaking at the UN Security Council, Amodei warned that poorly managed AI could pose a risk to humanity as a whole, saying no leader, company or nation could manage it alone. Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue pointed to AI's role in cyber defence, citing an incident in which OpenAI agents breached his company's infrastructure after escaping their testing environment.
Trump has repeatedly cast China as a competitor in the AI race, claiming the US is well ahead, while Xi has positioned Beijing as a champion of a new global AI order. Chinese state media have portrayed the country's strategy as a response to what they call a US-led effort to build an AI Iron Curtain.
Washington has moved to secure supply chains through the Pax Silica initiative, which India joined in February, while China launched a rival World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization. Kazakhstan is so far the only known country to have joined both.
The US has also restricted China's access to advanced semiconductors needed to train AI models, describing advanced AI as a technology with national security and military implications. Since 2018, Washington has tightened export controls on advanced chips with the stated aim of limiting China's access to the technology and related computing and AI applications.