The US and China are locked in a race to develop AI

US President Donald Trump has been blunt about his AI ambitions, as well as about who he considers the US's main rival to be: China.

His Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, has not said anything so forthright - but it seems he holds a similar view.

"China very much sees it as a race, they very much think China should be the leading force in AI - they see AI as a power maximiser," says Rebecca Arcesati, from the Mercator Institute for China Studies.

You can look beyond the rhetoric for evidence of this: AI has been a cornerstone of China's technological ambitions for more than a decade, whether Xi emphasises it publicly or not.

For Trump, beating China to AI supremacy outweighs any risks of the technology to humans - something he has described as "a hoax".

China's foreign ministry warned that "narratives of threat" and confrontation hinder global AI governance, calling for cooperation to ensure it benefits all.

It means when the two presidents sit down on Thursday there will be few more important topics than their AI ambitions - and what they say and decide will matter to the whole world.

There's no doubt the US and China are global leaders in AI but who is ahead depends on how success is measured.

American companies lead on so-called frontier models, with the highest-performing systems on most benchmarks coming from firms such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.

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