President Xi Jinping comes to Washington

President Donald Trump is set to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week. The last time the two met face-to-face was back in May, during a state visit to Beijing.

This time, the leaders are meeting in Washington D.C., where they’ll likely discuss some hot button issues like trade and artificial intelligence guardrails.

For more, “Marketplace Morning Report” host Kimberly Adams spoke with Scott Kennedy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kimberly Adams: So, what are some of the big economic issues on the table for this summit?

Scott Kennedy: The biggest economic issue for the summit is whether or not the economic truce that the two sides agreed to in October 2025 in Busan, South Korea, is going to be extended. That would mean capping American tariffs and not re-raising them, it also means China continuing to ship rare earths, and also both sides agreeing not to impose any additional major export controls on the other.

Adams: The last summit back in May produced a new U.S.-China Board of Trade and Board of Investment. Where do those stand right now?

Kennedy: The Board of Trade is a little bit more fulsome now. They, over the weekend, agreed that they would operationalize it, which means that they would just start working on trade issues — identifying $30 billion of goods on both sides, in which they could bring down to either standard normal tariff levels or potentially zero tariffs. They could also, if they choose to do so, use the Board of Trade to be a platform to discuss ongoing disagreements. For example, China's domestic economy is deeply unbalanced, and that's translating into global imbalances because of the size of the Chinese economy. And so, it's possible that the Board of Trade might be able to tackle those kinds of larger issues, which are important not only for the United States but for the rest of the world.

Adams: Last weekend, U.S. and Chinese officials met in New York to discuss AI and the potential dangers of the technology. What did the outcome of those meetings mean for the Trump-Xi summit?

Kennedy: Over the weekend, they did finally agree that they would start talking about AI and potentially reach an agreement to notify each other of when serious incidents occur. This is obviously referring to when AI potentially breaks out of its sandbox and starts doing things on the internet that it wasn't meant to do. That's a nice first step; it gets the ball rolling. But there's so much more that needs to be done. We need a lot more communication between Chinese AI companies and experts, and those in the United States, if we're really going to build guardrails that protect us all.

Adams: How are the two leaders actually thinking about AI guardrails, given that this is an area of pretty stiff competition between the U.S. and China?

Kennedy: Both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump see AI as a race for dominance. They don't want guardrails on their own efforts. They would like to constrain the other side. That said, a lot of the risks that we face from AI are not produced by the two governments per se, but by the technology itself and by potential terrorists and other actors who could do harm. And so, both sides have a self-interest in trying to make an agreement about third parties, other kinds of risks. And I think both sides understand or should understand that they can walk and chew gum at the same time. That you can have significant regulation of AI, management of its downsides, and still move incredibly fast.