President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping closed Xi's three-day Washington state visit with an agreement to set up a U.S.-China dialogue on artificial intelligence and to establish a channel for alerting each other to AI incidents. Both governments listed the steps among the visit's results: the White House calls the talks the U.S.-China Super Intelligence Dialogue, and China calls them the China-U.S. AI Dialogue. Trade talks held alongside the visit also extended the two countries' trade truce by two months.
China's official readout of the talks quotes Xi saying the two sides can keep talking about AI, exchange views on its risks and benefits, and work together to prevent its misuse and abuse. He also said AI must be kept under human control, and called for AI that is people-centered and used for good. Those are statements of intent from Beijing's readout, not a signed AI treaty.
Before the talks, Trump said on Truth Social that he wanted to leave Super Intelligence "exactly where it is." He kept promoting his Super Intelligence rebrand and later said Xi seemed to like the term. The White House says the two leaders agreed to use "super intelligence" instead of "artificial intelligence."
The dialogue grew out of talks that began Sept. 20 in New York between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and China's Vice Premier He Lifeng, which China's commerce ministry called the two sides' first dialogue on AI. The readout of the leaders' Thursday talks did not mention an incident channel, but both governments listed it among the visit's results on Sept. 25 and 26.
The new dialogue is due to meet again in November, the month of the APEC leaders' meeting in Shenzhen, and the G20 summit follows in Miami in December. It is not yet known how the incident channel will work, who will run it, or whether the dialogue will produce any shared rules.
Correction (Oct. 5): an earlier version of this story said the summit ended without an AI agreement and that a channel for alerting each other to AI incidents was not among its results. The lists of outcomes both governments published on Sept. 25 and 26 include a new U.S.-China dialogue on AI and an agreement to set up such a channel. The headline and story have been corrected.