When President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet in Washington this week, AI governance is expected to be at the top of the agenda. The United States and China have been racing to develop increasingly powerful AI systems, and neither has shown much appetite for slowing down. But not even the winner of the AI race will be exempt from the profound risks the technology poses.

The challenges posed by the development of artificial intelligence are no longer hypothetical. They are already a reality. Viewing AI solely through the lens of competition could cause China and the United States to miss opportunities to coordinate and address shared risks.

The United States needs to demonstrate solidarity with Japan as it faces concurrent challenges from China, Russia, and North Korea.

The upcoming Xi-Trump summit could yield progress on trade, AI and other areas, but deeper tensions will remain. Its significance may ultimately lie in three areas: stabilization, substance and symbolism.

The relationship is likely to remain characterized by the dynamics of cooperation and competition—with friction and coordination coexisting for the foreseeable future. The primary role for heads of state will not be to produce dramatic breakthroughs but rather to build trust.

By Quan Zhao GENEVA—When Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump meet in Washington this month, AI will be near the top of the agenda

For China, a prerequisite is characterizing the overall kind of relationship the two sides have before specific issues can be discussed. The United States has often taken the opposite approach, starting with results in specific areas, then expand. Now the two sides seem to be nudging closer.

The meeting of two presidents created a certain degree of stability and opened up possibilities for cooperation, but China-U.S. relations remain fundamentally fragile. Nudging the relationship in a constructive direction will require that both countries continue in good faith.

Trump’s trip to China signals the start of a new trade relationship, anchored in good economic fundamentals that are solid, stable and sustainable. Both countries stand to benefit, as does the rest of the world in terms of peace and prosperity.

The optics of this week’s summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping were carefully staged to signal parity between the United States and China. Trump, the first US president to visit mainland China in nearly a decade, was accompanied by an entourage of American CEOs—including Tesla’s Elon Musk (with his son X), Apple’s Tim Cook, Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang—whose businesses rely on maintaining good relations with the People’s Republic. They were duly given a grand welcome in the Great Hall of the People.