Trump rules out joint AI work with Beijing days after hotline deal

Washington will talk to Beijing about artificial intelligence going wrong, but not about building it together. A day after the White House said the two governments would open a direct channel for AI incidents, President Donald Trump ruled out any joint development effort, drawing the clearest line yet around what the two sides are prepared to share.

"When you're leading, you don't open it up to each other," Trump said, according to Al Jazeera. He also made clear he has no appetite for slowing the technology down, saying the United States "is not going to be putting on brakes" for AI, and he likened warnings about AI risk to climate change and the Russia collusion investigation, calling them "hoaxes."

A summit that barely touched the subject

Lawmakers and industry executives had hoped the three-day meeting between Trump and President Xi Jinping would produce something binding on AI. It did not. "We didn't spend that much time talking about it," Trump said of the talks. Two further meetings between the two leaders are planned this year, leaving room for the file to be reopened.

What did emerge was narrow and procedural: a bilateral communication channel for AI safety incidents, announced by the White House after the summit. Beijing had not immediately commented on the arrangement, though China's foreign ministry has said that as "artificial intelligence technologies are continuously developing, all parties can strengthen exchanges." Eurasian Post reported the channel and the administration's parallel move to rebrand the technology as "super intelligence" in its account of the incident hotline deal; Trump announced the renaming on Tuesday.

Safety yes, capability no

The distinction Washington is drawing matters more than the vocabulary. An incident channel is a deconfliction tool, closer to a military hotline than to a research partnership: it assumes both sides will keep racing and tries to stop an accident from being misread as an attack. Joint development, by contrast, would mean sharing model weights, training methods or compute access, and that is what Trump refused. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres used the same week to warn that AI development "without accountability" could put the world at risk, a position that sits awkwardly with an explicit refusal to apply brakes.

The pattern matches the wider relationship, where the two capitals have been able to agree on transactional, bounded items while leaving the strategic competition untouched, as with the tariff relief on $30 billion of goods each way agreed at the same summit.

What it means: For Eurasia's technology buyers, the message is that there will be no single global rulebook to defer to. Washington and Beijing have agreed to tell each other when something breaks and to compete flat out on everything else, which pushes the burden of governance onto middle powers that import their models and chips from one side or the other. Governments from Türkiye and the Gulf to Central Asia now have to write AI rules knowing the two leading suppliers will not harmonize theirs. The narrow channel is still worth something: it is the first standing line of communication on a technology both militaries are integrating fast, and in a crisis a working phone call is worth more than a treaty nobody signed.