President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi were set to sit down on Thursday with competition over artificial intelligence at the centre of an unresolved technology rivalry.
American companies retain the lead in frontier AI models. The highest-performing systems come from firms including Anthropic, Google and OpenAI. Yet the advantage has narrowed as Chinese developers have advanced rapidly and China has built a commanding position in the manufacturing and deployment of robots.
DeepSeek, a Chinese company, briefly matched the leading US model with an AI system in February 2025. As of March 2026, Anthropic’s top model was ahead by just 2.7%, according to researchers at Stanford University. Models including Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 have also found users in China and overseas. Yang Zhilin co-founded Moonshot in 2023.
The contest extends beyond the software models that have become the most visible measure of AI capability. China accounted for more than nine-tenths of global shipments of humanoid robots in the first half of the year, according to Chatham House. The International Federation of Robotics estimated that more than two million robots were working in China’s factories.
That combination of increasingly capable models and a large industrial base gives the summit a wider significance than a debate over which company holds the strongest system. American firms remain ahead at the frontier, while Chinese companies are closing the performance gap and China is deploying robots at a far greater scale.
Technology controls remain a central point of friction. US government restrictions prevent American companies from selling advanced microchips to Chinese firms. The restrictions bear directly on the resources available to Chinese companies seeking to train and run advanced AI systems.
The two sides also approach AI governance from different directions. Trump has described risks from AI to humans as “a hoax”, while OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has called for a coordinated slowdown in advanced AI development. China’s foreign ministry has said that “narratives of threat” and confrontation hinder global AI governance.
The meeting will take place amid these competing priorities. China has highlighted cooperation in global governance while objecting to language that casts AI competition as a threat.
It remains unclear whether the presidents will reach any agreement on AI, export controls or governance. The summit will nevertheless bring together the leaders of the two countries shaping a contest in which the US has the strongest frontier models, China has made rapid progress, and its position in humanoid robots and factory deployment is already extensive.
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