By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-09-27 18:21:36 | Updated at 2026-09-27 19:35:52
1 hour ago
U.S. President Donald Trump on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on Sept. 26, 2026. Trump is traveling to Knoxville, Tennessee to attend the University of Tennessee vs. University of Texas College football game. Aaron Schwartz/Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump has rejected the idea of cooperating with Beijing on artificial intelligence (AI), despite discussing the emerging technology with Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week.
“I would rather not integrate because we’re leading by a lot,” Trump told reporters before departing the White House on Sept. 26. “When you’re leading, you don’t open it up to each other.”
The United States leads China by “at least a year, and maybe a year and a half” in the AI race, Trump said.
“I’m not looking to open it up,” he added. “And we really didn’t talk much about it. We did talk about the name super intelligence.”
Trump’s comments were made just days after he hosted Xi at the White House for a bilateral summit to discuss issues spanning from trade to AI. He also treated the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader to a state dinner on Sept. 24 that was attended by a host of U.S.-based AI titans.
The bilateral talks came amid growing concerns among AI leaders and researchers that the fast-evolving technology could slip out of human control and even pose danger to humanity.
Trump, speaking to reporters on Sept. 26, dismissed such fears as “a hoax” that would benefit only America’s adversary.
“The United States of America is not going to be putting on break,” Trump said. “They want to stop our progress, because we’re leading China by a lot, and we’re going to keep it that way.”
Trump also reiterated his proposal to rename AI as “super intelligence,” or SI—an idea he said Xi liked as well.
“Artificial means it’s fake, and it’s not fake. It’s very strong intelligence. I think a lot of people are doing that now. I call it SI.”
China’s foreign ministry said in a Sept. 26 statement that Beijing “attaches great importance” to and “respects” Washington’s shift to the term “super intelligence.”
This marked the first time Beijing directly addressed the Trump administration’s adoption of the new term.
Shortly after Xi left Washington on Sept. 25, the United States and China issued separate statements outlining the outcome of the leaders’ summit. The White House said the two leaders agreed to use SI rather than AI, a point not mentioned in China’s commerce ministry’s readout.
Unlike the debate in Washington, which focused on AI’s potential threats to humanity’s future, Chinese officials’ concerns largely center on the technology’s risk to the CCP’s grip on power.
China’s spy chief, Chen Yixin, warned that AI could be misused by what he called “hostile forces” and poses “direct threats to China’s political security, institutional security, and ideological security,” according to a Sept. 13 article published in the official Cyberspace magazine. He also called for greater Party control over AI.
