Trump Says He Discussed AI Guardrails With Xi as Chip Export Questions Linger

President Donald Trump said Friday that he raised the possibility of cooperating with China on artificial intelligence safety measures during his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, even as key technology trade issues — including chip export controls — remained unresolved after the talks.

"We talked about possibly working together for guardrails" on AI, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One following the conclusion of his meetings with Xi.

The remarks came at the end of a trip that drew an unusually prominent roster of American technology executives. Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Tesla's Elon Musk, Apple's Tim Cook, and representatives from Meta, Micron, Qualcomm, and Coherent all traveled with the U.S. delegation on the more than 20-hour flight from Alaska to China on Wednesday.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the business leaders had the "opportunity yesterday in a meeting with President Trump and President Xi to come in and talk a little bit about their companies," noting in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Friday that Huang was specifically present.

Despite the high-profile attendance of Nvidia's chief executive, Greer confirmed that chip export controls were not addressed during the bilateral meeting — a significant omission given the stakes for the semiconductor industry.

A licensing arrangement for Nvidia's H200 AI chips would be "politically explosive" and trigger a "fierce backlash from China hawks" in Congress, Heidi Crebo-Rediker, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told reporters earlier in the week. Separately, Washington had cleared sales of Nvidia's H200 chips to several major Chinese technology firms, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Greer acknowledged China's ambivalence on the question of purchasing American chips. "They're very committed to domestic production, they often see U.S. high tech as a threat to them," he said. "If we're ahead of the game on AI chips…sometimes they feel that can stop their own growth."

Access to critical and rare earth minerals — another central technology concern — also surfaced during the trip. China controls the vast majority of the global market for those materials, and Beijing's curbs on certain exports were a key instrument of retaliation during the tariff confrontations of 2025.

A trade truce on rare earth flows remains in effect through this fall, which Greer described as "solid," though he declined to commit to an extension. "We'll see about that," he said, adding that there is "certainly a willingness on both sides" to extend the arrangement if conditions hold.

Crebo-Rediker characterized a truce extension as the "best-case outcome" for U.S. supply chain resilience, noting that "the U.S. and its allies cannot out-mine, out-process or outspend China quickly enough to rebuild resilience in the near term."

Xi, for his part, signaled openness to expanded commerce. The Chinese president told the American executives traveling with Trump that the door to doing business in China would "open wider," according to state-backed newspaper Xinhua.

Whether that signal translates into concrete policy movement — on chips, minerals, or AI cooperation — will likely become clearer in negotiations expected to continue into the summer, with a potential return visit by Xi to the United States in September being watched as the next major diplomatic waypoint.

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