Trump and Xi leave Washington with an AI hotline and little else
Xi Jinping's three-day state visit ended on 25 September with the two governments agreeing to keep a formal US-China AI dialogue going, run by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and to work on a notification channel for AI incidents serious enough to touch national security. There was no joint statement and no framework. Two days earlier at the UN, Trump had rejected any global scheme to control AI and told delegates that US documents would now call it super intelligence. Read together, the message is that both sides will talk, and neither intends to be regulated by anyone else.
UK angle: Neither superpower wants outside rules on AI. UK firms selling into either market should plan for two regimes that talk to each other and agree on little.
