US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is set to raise artificial intelligence, rare earths and trade barriers with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng days before President Donald Trump hosts Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House on September 24. Reuters said the talks could continue at a technical or working level into Monday, and the Associated Press first reported the US plans.
Bessent signaled Washington is willing to talk about limiting shared risks. 'We are open to discussions on avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems,' he told Axios. The agenda includes open- and closed-weight AI models, an increasingly important commercial distinction. Chinese open-weight models are attracting US buyers because they are cheaper than closed US models. CSIS data shows Chinese models accounted for 41% of Hugging Face downloads over the last year.
Z.ai's GLM-5.2 model, with roughly 750 billion parameters, is competitive with top US closed models in coding and agent tasks. Stanford's 2026 AI Index found the top American model was only 2.7% ahead of the top Chinese model in March. The National Archives website reportedly used Alibaba's Qwen model for searching proposed federal regulations, while the FBI separately accused Alibaba of stealing Anthropic's technology.
Rare earths are a key point of leverage for Beijing. China's 2025 export restrictions disrupted defense, semiconductor and automotive supply chains before Washington and Beijing suspended them for a year. The US has backed alternative supply chains, including a decade-long MP Materials deal that established a neodymium-praseodymium production floor of $110 per kilogram, though vertically integrated mine-to-magnet capacity outside China remains years away.
Trade is also in focus ahead of the summit. A tariff truce is due to expire on November 10, and the two sides have discussed mutual tariff reductions covering $30 billion in goods. Energy tariffs may be included, potentially clearing the way for Chinese imports of US LNG, which ranged from $7.5 billion to $12 billion annually between 2020 and 2024. Beijing may also lower duties on US agricultural goods. A major Boeing aircraft order could give Trump a visible export win; Xi is preparing a large business delegation similar to his 2015 trip, when China signed a $38 billion deal for 300 Boeing aircraft.
Taiwan and Iran add geopolitical risk. Xi is expected to press Trump on Taiwan, where a pending US weapons package worth as much as $14 billion has been called a negotiating chip. Trump is also expected to ask China to use its influence over Iran, though Beijing has shown little willingness to do so.
The economic scale is large. PwC forecasts global AI infrastructure investment of $31.6 trillion by 2050, with $15.1 trillion in the US and $8.2 trillion in Asia Pacific. BCG says separate US and China AI ecosystems are forming around chips, cloud services, processors and applications.
For crypto markets, the summit is a macro event. A breakdown in trade talks or tighter technology restrictions could pressure risk assets, while any truce extension would remove a source of uncertainty. No major cryptocurrency is named directly in the diplomatic agenda, but AI-linked digital assets may react to AI policy signals and broader risk sentiment.
