US and China plan first Trump-era AI talks for September as Beijing weighs export curbs

The United States and China are planning their first official artificial-intelligence talks under the Trump administration for September 2026, people briefed on the plans said. The talks would likely convene before Xi Jinping’s scheduled September 24 visit to the United States.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will lead the American delegation, according to four people familiar with the matter; the agenda, location and Chinese participants remain undetermined. The talks stem from a Trump-Xi summit in May 2026 and follow growing mutual concern over frontier AI capabilities, cyberattack risk and labor-market disruption.

The diplomatic opening comes as Beijing moves the other way on technology flows. China’s Ministry of Commerce is consulting Alibaba, ByteDance, Zhipu and Huawei on tightening export controls over overseas access to the country’s most advanced AI models, including open-weight downloads and training-data transfers, people familiar with the consultation said.

The proposed curbs would also restrict overseas chipmakers such as Qualcomm and TSMC from producing semiconductors based on Chinese firms’ designs, and would enter China’s next catalogue of restricted export technologies. Industry feedback is still being gathered, and no measure has been finalized.

Taken together, the two developments capture the paradox of the current US-China AI relationship: enough shared alarm to schedule the first formal dialogue in years, alongside fresh moves by each side to wall off its most sensitive technology. Neither government has publicly confirmed the September talks or the export package.