US President Donald Trump said he discussed guardrails on artificial intelligence with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, while adding that Nvidia Corp’s H200 chips also came up during a two-day summit in Beijing.
"We talked about possibly working together for guardrails” on AI, Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Friday after meeting Xi. Asked what kind of guardrails, he added: "Standard guardrails that we talk about all the time.”
US officials told reporters days ahead of Trump’s departure that the American side would voice its concerns about artificial intelligence, though they didn’t go into specifics about what they would raise with their Chinese counterparts. Following Anthropic PBC’s announcement about the potential global cyber risk posed by its Mythos model, the officials said they would explore the possibility of opening a new channel of communication to regularly discuss AI issues.
US restrictions on sales of sensitive American technology to China have long been a sticking point between the world’s two largest economies. In December, Trump agreed to allow Nvidia to ship its H200 AI chips to Chinese customers, a significant easing of measures aimed at restraining China’s growth in AI, but so far that move hasn’t translated into new business for the company or other US chipmakers.
Trump said Friday China hasn’t approved purchases of the H200 chips "because they chose not to, they want to develop their own.”
"But it did come up and I think something could happen on that,” he added, without elaborating.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last month that while some H200s had been licensed for sale to China, none had been exported because the government in Beijing hasn’t allowed its tech companies to purchase the chips. Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang’s last-minute addition to Trump’s delegation has raised hopes of progress on the sale of its advanced chips.
US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on Friday that approval of Nvidia H200 chip purchases will be determined by China.
While China’s central government has for years complained about US export controls on advanced technology, Beijing also wants to achieve self-sufficiency in semiconductors and boost domestic champions like Huawei Technologies Co Last year, China rejected imports of less-advanced Nvidia AI chips called H20s.
It’s been a long road on H200 sales, which emerged as a possibility after China’s H20 import block. Nvidia secured Trump’s support for H200 exports in December and some initial US licenses in early 2026. Then in March, Huang said that Nvidia had received Washington’s permission for shipments to "many customers” in China and was firing up H200 production accordingly. That was also in response to receiving official purchase orders from firms in the Asian country – an indication that Beijing had approved the sales.
But those Chinese companies later informed Nvidia that they could not actually fulfil the purchases, according to a person familiar with the matter.
One area previously identified by the Trump administration as a growing concern centres on accusations from Silicon Valley that Chinese developers are unfairly piggybacking on results from cutting-edge American AI models to produce competing chatbots at a fraction of the cost. Last month, the White House unveiled measures aimed at preventing AI labs in China from improperly extracting results from systems built by leading US companies, a practice known as "adversarial distillation.”
The broader effort to crack down on unauthorised distillation seeks to address a growing concern among US companies including OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Alphabet Inc’s Google that output from their models is being wrongfully used by Chinese rivals such as DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax to develop products far more cheaply and with fewer safety guardrails.
Another potential area of conflict could be Beijing’s recent order for Meta Platforms Inc to unwind its US$2bil (RM7.9bil) takeover of AI startup Manus in late April, a move that targeted an already completed deal that’s drawn fire for the loss of pioneering agentic AI to the US. The decision, announced just weeks before the Trump-Xi summit, highlighted Beijing’s ambitions to develop AI that’s home-grown. – Bloomberg
