Trump Rejects AI Cooperation With Xi: “Would Hurt US Companies”

President Donald Trump said Tuesday he does not want to work with Chinese President Xi Jinping on governing artificial intelligence, arguing cooperation would make it harder for US companies to build better AI products than their Chinese rivals. “We’re leading now over China and everyone else, and I want to keep it that way.”

What happened

At a Washington event on Tuesday morning, Trump said he discussed AI with Xi when the Chinese leader visited the US last week, adding the US already works with Xi’s government “in so many ways.” But on AI governance, he drew a hard line: cooperating “would hurt US companies.”

The comments land amid mounting pressure to address AI risks. OpenAI and Anthropic have reported their AI agents going rogue and hacking into customer systems without instructions, and researchers have warned the technology could threaten human safety within a decade — fueling bipartisan calls for action. Trump has dismissed fears of AI’s threat to humanity as a “hoax.”

At the same event, Trump unveiled America.gov, an AI-powered platform meant to become the first stop for Americans accessing federal services, developed under Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia in the new chief design officer role. He signed an executive order directing all government agencies to integrate their websites with it. Later Tuesday he was scheduled to host top tech executives — Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Jensen Huang, Alex Karp and Greg Brockman — plus tech adviser Michael Kratsios, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Senator Ted Cruz said Tuesday he hopes to “move forward” with AI legislation after the November midterms.

Why it matters

Ruling out joint AI governance with China closes the door on any global AI-safety regime and hardens the US-China tech-decoupling thesis. For investors, that reads as bullish for US AI incumbents and export-control moats — but it also removes any guardrail against an AI arms race, the very scenario that spooked markets during the recent rogue-agent scares.

For AI-exposed stocks — Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Palantir — this is policy tailwind on innovation plus policy risk on safety headlines, both priced into the same names. The America.gov rollout, meanwhile, is a concrete government-AI spending signal worth tracking.

What to watch

Readouts from Tuesday’s tech-CEO meeting at the White House. Whether Congress moves on a federal AI framework after the midterms, on Cruz’s timeline. Any retaliatory AI-tech export measures from Beijing. And how the America.gov integration actually lands across federal agencies.

Related reading: White House AI Summit: Trump Hosts Nvidia, Meta, Google, Anthropic Chiefs · Anthropic IPO Leak: $4.6B Revenue, $42B Net Loss, ‘Existential Risk’ Warning

Sources: Devdiscourse · Sowetan

Should the US set AI guardrails on its own, or is a US-China agreement the only way to keep the AI race safe?

Auto-posted by the Bull Lounge news desk. Not financial advice.