The White House said after a summit between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that the two sides agreed to refer to AI as "super intelligence" or "SI" and to pursue a dialogue on SI. That’s the kind of polished language empires love: a neat label, a bilateral channel, and a lot of machinery humming underneath while ordinary people get told this is what "governance" looks like.
The summit produced little progress beyond a formal dialogue and a bilateral communication channel. Small wonder. The real contest isn’t about public safety or democratic control. It’s about which state gets to set the terms, which corporations get to profit, and which populations get folded into someone else’s technology sphere.
Who Gets to Name the Machine
Xi said during talks with Trump that "The right thing to do on AI ... is to 'draw on each other's strengths, not guard against each other'" and added, "The two sides can continue their dialogue on AI, exchange views on its risks and benefits, and jointly prevent the misuse and abuse of AI." That sounds cooperative enough on paper. In practice, it’s two power centers negotiating over a technology that already reaches far beyond their borders.
Trump said earlier this month, "We're leading China in AI...and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins." That’s the blunt version. No civic poetry, no public-interest theater. Just a race between ruling blocs, with everyone else expected to live inside the outcome.
The CNN explainer said the United States has an obvious edge, with pioneering AI labs, the most advanced chips and deep-pocketed investors, and that Washington is forcing countries around the world to pick a side. It said China has a vision that, for many, may be more compelling because it is championing a more open ecosystem centered on accessibility and lower cost. That’s the hook: one empire sells dominance through expensive exclusivity, the other through cheaper access. Either way, the structure stays hierarchical.
Who Pays for the Race
In July, Xi launched the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, a rival grouping to the Pax Silica alliance that Trump formed last year to reduce reliance on China for AI supply chains. More than two dozen countries and the European Union signed up to Pax Silica, while Xi recruited 29 countries, including Russia, Indonesia and Pakistan, to his alternative vision of open models. The blocs are dressed up as cooperation. They’re also supply-chain discipline, geopolitical sorting, and pressure on countries to line up behind one camp or the other.
The CNN report said Chinese models' global usage rose in a year from less than 15% to over 54% last week, led by DeepSeek, according to OpenRouter data. It said American firms including Airbnb, DoorDash and Shopify have embraced Chinese models for their lower costs and greater flexibility for customization. The market, naturally, follows price and power. Workers and users don’t get asked much about the terms.
Eric Olander, editor in chief of The China-Global South Project, said, "It may not be that DeepSeek or Moonshot will make much money, but the companies surrounding them – Huawei, ZTE, the others providing support, providing technology, providing all the services around AI, may do very well." That’s the familiar arrangement: the headline names get the attention, while the surrounding industrial stack cashes in.
Chucheng Feng, founding partner of advisory firm Hutong Research, said, "For most people around the world, the question will ultimately be about what kind of trade-off they want to make," adding, "Do I want a model that costs 10 times as much but is six months ahead, or one that costs one-tenth as much but is only six months behind?" That’s not a free choice. It’s a forced bargain inside a system built by corporations and states.
What They Call Security
The CNN report also said Washington has accused China of "industrial-scale theft" of American trade secrets and that Anthropic and OpenAI have released reports claiming leading Chinese AI labs trained their models on outputs from American systems, a process known as distillation. Beijing has rejected those accusations. The language is familiar: accusations, counter-accusations, and a permanent security panic that keeps the public far from the real decisions.
Reva Goujon, a director focusing on China at Rhodium Group, said, "The question is what does this US administration actually do about it?" George Chen, chair of digital practice at The Asia Group consultancy, said, "Beijing continues to believe Washington seeks to contain China’s rise in AI and other emerging technologies, a perception that will shape the pace and scope of future engagement for the two countries on AI." That’s the state logic laid bare. Containment, competition, leverage, and managed engagement.
CNBC said AI was a major focus as Trump and Xi met this week and reported that Chinese AI models have gone from a relatively small share of usage to a majority on two major developer platforms. On OpenRouter, Chinese models accounted for 57%-67% of tokens used in the week of Sept. 14, up from 6%-13% in February. On Vercel, their share rose to 55% in August from 11% in January. CNBC said OpenRouter's data covered companies in the U.S., Europe and what it defines as the "Global South" — 82 countries across Central and South America, Africa and Asia.
Two U.S. House committees are investigating the impact of rising adoption of Chinese models. Daniel Remler, a senior fellow in the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security, said Chinese AI represents "real economic and security risks for the United States," and added, "The ultimate concern is that the integration of Chinese AI models pulls countries into a Chinese technology sphere of influence that hardens into geopolitical alignment." That’s the fear of every empire: not harm to people, but loss of control over the network.
Peter Walker, head of insights at OpenRouter, said Chinese open source models released this year "can credibly perform in advanced agentic use cases, especially in regards to coding, in a way that was just not true in late 2025." Harpreet Arora, head of agentic infrastructure at Vercel, said, "Chinese models are becoming capable enough for more tasks at a much lower cost. Once a model meets the quality bar for the job, that price difference becomes compelling." Cheap, capable, and widely adopted. That’s the part the bosses can’t ignore.
Remler also said, "Southeast Asia in particular may see significant uptake of Chinese AI models given the close economic and cultural linkages [with China] plus growing digital infrastructure," and, "Anywhere from Lagos to São Paulo to Jakarta where entrepreneurs and governments are looking for cheap, open models, will look first to Chinese AI." The phrase "entrepreneurs and governments" says plenty. The people at the bottom are expected to adapt to whatever infrastructure the powerful choose.
The Washington Post reported that the United States and Russia weakened a global UN effort to regulate lethal autonomous weapons by stripping safeguards from the language. That’s the final insult in this whole circus: the same states that claim to be managing risk are also sanding down the rules meant to restrain killer machines.