Against the backdrop of China-U.S. competition in AI, China-ASEAN cooperation can offer regional countries more practical help in navigating the competitive landscape with greater confidence.

The recent Xi-Trump summit produced a modest but telling outcome on artificial intelligence. An agreement was arrived at to establish a bilateral communication channel for AI-related incidents, with further dialogue scheduled.

The U.S.-China AI rivalry is being reshaped by the rapid advance of frontier models and a widening divide between U.S.-led closed systems and China’s increasingly competitive open-weight ecosystem. As AI systems become more autonomous and capable, the race for technological leadership is creating risks that traditional diplomacy and governance mechanisms may be increasingly ill-equipped to manage.

As voices questioning artificial intelligence grow louder in the United States, the deeper concerns behind them touch political nerves. AI could well become a new dividing line in the American political spectrum, much like gun control and abortion.

South-South cooperation provides avenues for countries to extract greater dividends from existing capabilities by pooling resources, sharing implementation lessons and building more context-appropriate AI systems.

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.

In the past few weeks, the global AI race has entered a new, existential stage. What makes this fluid status quo particularly perilous is the effort to exploit AI for global supremacy.

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

Moonshot AI’s Kimi is emerging as a Chinese competitor to Anthropic’s Claude, with increasingly comparable capabilities but notable differences in performance, personality and content restrictions. The comparison highlights how the two models reflect distinct technological approaches and regulatory environments as competition between the U.S. and China’s AI industries intensifies.