Overview
- President Trump confirmed on Monday that Chinese leader Xi Jinping will visit Washington on September 24 and that AI will be a central topic at the talks.
- The U.S. Treasury has launched an inquiry into whether Chinese models were trained by 'distillation,' a process that copies capabilities by training on the outputs of more advanced systems rather than retraining from raw data.
- Several Chinese startups including DeepSeek, Zhipu AI and Moonshot have released low-cost, high-performance models such as Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2 that experts say match top U.S. systems on key benchmarks.
- Industry leaders including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and many U.S. firms have warned against broad restrictions on Chinese open-weight models because many American startups rely on or build atop those models.
- Washington’s probe and tightened export controls on advanced chips and GPUs aim to preserve a U.S. edge, while Beijing pursues domestic self-sufficiency and wide industrial deployment of AI that could shape the outcome of the September talks.