US and China Take Competing AI Strategies to High-Stakes Washington Summit

As President Trump and Xi Jinping met in Washington on September 24, 2026, the two superpowers confronted a starkly shifted AI landscape: Chinese models have closed the capability gap with US counterparts, offering dramatically cheaper alternatives that are rapidly winning market share. The summit, which included major US technology executives from Amazon, Alphabet, OpenAI, Apple, Tesla, and NVIDIA, underscored the intensity of an AI race no longer defined by US dominance but by fundamental strategic divergence.