When Xi Jinping lands in Maryland this week for his first state visit to the United States since 2015, the diplomatic choreography will be unusually warm — Donald Trump has reportedly expressed a desire to greet him with a hug. Yet beneath the bonhomie, the two largest economies in the world remain deeply at odds over trade policy, export controls, and geopolitical rivalry. A previous face-to-face meeting in Beijing in May produced extensive talk of "strategic stability" but yielded few concrete results. Analysts are not expecting that to change.

"Expectations are very low," said Bonnie Glaser, a managing director at the German Marshall Fund. "Nobody is using the term 'deliverables'." The most substantive signal to emerge ahead of the summit concerns artificial intelligence. On Sunday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent concluded talks with Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng in which a bilateral AI safety mechanism was proposed — one that stops short of a binding agreement but would establish a formal channel between Washington and Beijing.

The proposal was echoed in Tuesday's edition of the People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's official newspaper, which called on both nations to "make AI a new frontier for China-US cooperation." António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, separately urged the two governments to build guardrails around the technology. The stakes are underscored by the guest list for a White House state dinner on Thursday, which is reported to include Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen Huang — a gathering of tech executives whose combined companies represent the commanding heights of global AI development.