Trump-Xi summit updates: Trade, AI, Iran and Taiwan top US-China talks

Thank you for following our live page on the Trump and Xi summit.

Check out some of our other coverage of the summit here and here.

We will be closing this live page shortly, but before we do, here is some of what we covered today:

• Though meetings were closed to the press, Trump and Xi were expected to speak about trade, AI and the US war on Iran. The US president has said he had a “great meeting” with Xi following their discussions in the White House, without elaborating.
• Xi told Trump to oppose Taiwanese independence, according to Chinese state news service Xinhua. The news agency also reported Xi told Trump he supports the US and Iran returning to the terms of a memorandum of understanding signed in June.
• Republicans and Democrats criticised China during the visit.  Republican Senator Todd Young told reporters, “The priority should be national security. In particular, the president should make clear that we know that China is collaborating with the Iranian regime, and we’re prepared to take some sort of action.”
• Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said, “If you’re a foreign authoritarian, Trump won’t just invite you to visit America, he’ll greet you plane-side.”

While showing Xi the Presidential Walk of Fame portrait gallery he installed earlier in his term, Trump pointed to the place for Biden, saying, “This is the autopen.” Xi laughed and received an affectionate pat on the arm from Trump.

Trump has repeatedly referred to Biden as an “autopen”, alleging Biden used the device on high-profile presidential pardons and appointments while mocking his age and mental acuity.

As the summit focuses on trade, geopolitics and AI, the issue of human rights in China is likely to fall by the wayside.

As the two leaders meet inside the White House, demonstrators held raucous protests in Washington, DC on Beijing’s human rights record, including its treatment of Uighur and Tibetan minorities.

Trump was planning to ask Xi to free two US citizens held by China, a Trump administration official said ahead of the summit. The two US Citizens are Youlin Chen, a Chinese-born expert on North Korean nuclear tests who has been imprisoned since late 2024, and Min Zin, a scholar arrested in June, according to Chen’s wife Yufang Rong.

But rights advocates and US lawmakers have called on Trump to bring up other issues, including a controversial new Chinese law they say will allow officials to target critics inside and outside China.

“During your meeting with Xi Jinping, it is imperative that you continue to voice your administration’s disapproval of this affront to the fundamental freedoms of minority communities, human rights advocates and US citizens,” a group of 37 members of the US House of Representatives said in a letter to Trump yesterday.

In 2021, at the end of Trump’s first term, the US State Department said China’s mass imprisonment of Uighurs and other measures were aimed at erasing the minority, and found the policies amounted to “genocide and crimes against humanity”.

Human rights groups say China has detained Uighurs on the pretext of countering extremism and confined them in re-education camps, in allegations denied by Beijing.

“Xi’s visit to Washington is a strategic moment to move beyond words of condemnation on the Uighur genocide,” World Uyghur Congress President Turgunjan Alawdun said.

President Xi has announced that China will send two giant pandas to a zoo in the US city of Atlanta. Xi said the pair of pandas would serve as “envoys of friendship” between the two countries. Ping Ping and Fu Shuang will arrive at Zoo Atlanta within days, Xi added.

The announcement is the latest example of a practice known as “panda diplomacy”, through which China has sought to promote goodwill with the US since 1972.

Competition over AI is expected to be a focal point of the Trump-Xi summit, as both superpowers are accelerating their race for Big Tech hegemony.

Earlier this week, Washington proposed an artificial intelligence “notification mechanism” with China when the two countries’ finance ministers met, described as a hotline to alert each other when AI incidents threaten national security.

The Chinese president touched on AI in his opening remarks on Thursday, saying the two superpowers have a responsibility to ensure that AI is always under human control.

While the US currently leads in groundbreaking AI spending, progress and hardware, China is closing the gap through aggressive state-backed deployment and has made massive breakthroughs in software efficiency.

AI model usage, meanwhile, remains higher in China than in the US. We’ve put together some charts to show where things stand.

Read more here.

While Trump’s welcoming of Xi has prompted some US lawmakers to accuse the White House of cosying up to a US rival, Republican Senator Rand Paul, a critic of interventionist foreign policy, has said that the meeting is a positive step that could help avoid conflict.

“I’m glad this meeting is happening; diplomacy is key,” Paul said in a social media post in response to a video of Trump and Xi at the White House. “Talk more, war less.”

Presidents Trump and Xi are expected to discuss a wide range of issues such as trade, AI and the US war on Iran.

While the two superpowers are at odds on many of those issues, Trump and Xi hope to build closer ties that will allow them to navigate their differences without resorting to conflict.

Journalists from MS NOW, CNN, and Politico have returned to the White House, following a court ruling that ordered their access restored after the Trump administration barred them over coverage it did not like. That move prompted swift pushback from press freedom advocates.

Photos show media workers from those outlets back on the White House grounds on Thursday, during a visit from Chinese President Xi Jinping.

A Republican member of the United States Senate Intelligence Committee has advised Trump to warn Xi about ties with Iran.

“The priority should be national security. In particular, the president should make clear that we know that China is collaborating with the Iranian regime, and we’re prepared to take some sort of action,” US Senator Todd Young told reporters Tuesday at the US Capitol.

Young added: “[Trump] should articulate – or intimate – what that action will be if they continue to cooperate with the Islamic Republic, a terrorist regime.”

“He has great interest in granite. He likes granite. He’s an expert on stones, aside from many other things. And he loves good granite,” Trump said after showing Xi the newly opened helipad at the White House.

Xi took Trump on a tour of a secretive imperial garden in Beijing earlier this year and in 2017 Trump and his wife attended a state dinner in the Forbidden City.

United States Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has criticised Trump during Xi’s visit, saying the occasion has been too lavish.

“If you’re a foreign authoritarian, Trump won’t just invite you to visit America, he’ll greet you plane-side,” Schumer said on the Senate floor on Thursday.

Schumer suggested that Trump should take his “trade war truce” to NATO ally Canada rather than China, arguing that the president was failing to stand up to Beijing on issues including advanced artificial intelligence technology, fentanyl trafficking and protecting US auto workers.

“Meeting an authoritarian at the bottom of the stairs is easy. Standing up to him at the negotiating table is the hard part,” Schumer said. “So far, Trump hasn’t managed it.”

Schumer added that Trump had an “atavistic attraction to dictators” and accused him of acting based on “who flatters him at the moment”.

The US president has said he had a “great meeting” with Xi following their discussions in the White House, without elaborating.

The two leaders boarded the Marine One presidential helicopter after a short tour of the White House.

Back in 2009, when Xi Jinping came here to the White House, he was given a similar sort of reception. He was then the Chinese vice president, and there was one very loud voice among Republicans who said that this was wrong and you shouldn’t be doing that, and that was Donald Trump.

Donald Trump went to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Wednesday evening to greet Xi Jinping. That’s unusual. That hasn’t happened, bar a couple of folks, since 1962 when the US president met a foreign leader as he landed on the soil. And then there was the big ceremony that you saw with the fly-past of American planes, the full military display in front of Xi Jinping.

We know that Donald Trump likes military displays. He was very impressed by what he saw when he was in Beijing in May, and he wanted to have something similar for Xi Jinping.

Then there comes the meeting, the hard work, when they will talk about the key issues, like AI.  Both are not on the same page on that, by the way. The war in Iran, tariffs as well, and of course, Taiwan will be mentioned, although probably not to the degree that people in Taiwan would like.

Xi told Trump that China’s position on territorial integrity is absolutely clear, according to the Chinese state news service Xinhua.

The agency reported that the Chinese leader urged Trump to oppose Taiwanese independence and handle the issue prudently.

US policy has long sought to balance support for the self-governed island with relations with Beijing, which claims Taiwan as an essential part of its territory.

We’ve published several stories covering various aspects of Xi’s visit to Washington. Here are a few highlights:

• Explainer: Trump-Xi summit: Here’s what’s on the agenda, and why it matters
• Watch: Trump welcomes China’s Xi Jinping to White House
• Editor’s analysis: Trump and Xi summit will focus on ‘stabilising’ ties, experts say
• In depth: As AI leaders warn of catastrophe, US and China shun slowdown calls

And there’s plenty more here.

As we’ve been reporting, a saga over media access to the White House has been playing out on the sidelines of the Trump-Xi meeting.

Despite a judge’s order overnight, the White House had, earlier today, continued to block reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico from accessing the premises.

Reporters have now said they have been granted access. The White House press operations director has also said in a court filing that full media access has been restored.