President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit the United States on September 24, with artificial intelligence set to be the defining topic of the summit-level talks.
"President Xi is coming over on September 24th, and we talked about it (artificial intelligence) when I was over in Beijing, and we'll be talking about it again," Trump told reporters. The announcement came on the same day the White House confirmed it is monitoring the fallout from OpenAI's "rogue" AI incident and as lawmakers on Capitol Hill proposed the first "AI Kill Switch" bill.
The summit — which will be Xi's first visit to the US since Trump returned to the White House — follows Trump's state visit to Beijing in May 2026, where he invited the Chinese leader. On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi discussed the need to identify areas of cooperation to lay the groundwork for what they called a "very positive visit."
The timing is significant. The summit comes against a backdrop of escalating US-China tensions over AI safety, export controls on advanced chips, and a recent White House accusation that Chinese AI lab Moonshot distilled Anthropic's models to build its Kimi K3 system. Trump's announcement also coincides with a broader market selloff triggered by Alphabet's first negative free cash flow since 2004 as AI spending surges.
Rubio has previously pushed back against European and domestic talk of an AI "kill switch," telling diplomats to downplay such language. The September meeting could accelerate efforts to establish guardrails for frontier AI development — an area where both the US and China have acknowledged the need for bilateral coordination, even as competition intensifies.
China's AI labs — including DeepSeek and Moonshot — are simultaneously racing toward public listings in what analysts are calling the "Great Chinese AI IPO Rush," adding further urgency to the geopolitical stakes of the Trump-Xi summit.
