Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet in Washington on September 23-24, 2026, with artificial intelligence at the center of discussions between the world’s two largest economies. Trump has said that "whoever wins AI, wins," claimed the United States leads China "by a lot," and described AI’s impact as "bigger than the industrial revolution." Xi has made AI central to China’s economic and geopolitical strategy while advocating cooperation to prevent competition from escalating into direct confrontation. The leaders previously discussed AI guardrails in Beijing in May 2026 but reached no formal agreement. Ahead of the Washington summit, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng to work toward an AI dialogue channel, including possible incident notification protocols for serious problems arising from AI development. Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang are expected to attend alongside the two leaders. The talks will take place amid U.S. export controls on advanced chips, including Nvidia’s H200, and China’s investment in domestic alternatives. Chinese models such as DeepSeek have at times matched leading U.S. systems, with analysts describing the performance gap as only a few percentage points. The European Union has established its own AI regulatory framework, while other countries are watching the U.S.-China relationship to decide where to align. Any change in restrictions on advanced chips could affect semiconductor markets and Nvidia, whose fortunes have partly tracked the state of U.S.-China relations. A formal incident-notification mechanism would be the first concrete bilateral AI safety agreement between the countries, but the outcome will depend on whether either side sees limited cooperation as worth the political cost of appearing to concede ground.