The White House announced on Friday (November 13) that President Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Shenzhen, China next week to promote the reduction of nuclear weapons. This will be the first such meeting between leaders of the three countries. However, Reuters quoted a senior US official as saying that no agreement was expected to be reached at the meeting.
The heads of state of the United States and China will also discuss the establishment of emergency communication channels for artificial intelligence incidents. The meeting was overshadowed by the espionage scandal involving former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, but U.S. officials said Trump was not expected to mention it.
Trump will depart on Monday (November 16) for a four-day trip to Asia, during which he will also visit the Philippines.
Nuclear disarmament: US officials believe that China should "let China sit at the adult table"
The three-party meeting is scheduled to be held on Thursday (November 19) during the APEC meeting in Shenzhen. White House spokesperson Olivia Wales told reporters: "He will discuss reducing nuclear weapons around the world, and President Trump believes that the proliferation of nuclear weapons is very dangerous." U.S. officials interviewed by Reuters said Trump will also talk about the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran, but is not expected to mention Ukraine.
"We don't anticipate any kind of agreement," the official said. "This is a difficult topic for China to deal with, but we do think it's time for China to sit at the 'grown-up table' and have grown-up conversations about grown-up matters."
China has long refused to engage in nuclear negotiations with the United States, arguing that the United States and Russia, which have larger nuclear arsenals, should talk directly. Li Chijiang, China’s ambassador for disarmament affairs, told the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly on October 16: “China’s nuclear power is not at the same level as that of the United States and Russia. It is unfair, unreasonable, and unfeasible to require China to participate in the so-called trilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations between China, the United States, and Russia at this stage.”
Chinese state media said Xi would hold "bilateral" talks on the sidelines of the summit, but made no mention of a trilateral meeting. Moscow and Beijing have yet to comment on the White House announcement.
The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) between the United States and Russia expired in February this year, and the world's two largest nuclear arsenals have since lost major restrictions. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia stores the largest number of nuclear warheads, followed by the United States and China.
Artificial Intelligence Safety: Trump Says China “Does What President Xi Says”
When Trump and Xi Jinping met in Washington in September, they agreed to establish an emergency communication channel for artificial intelligence incidents. The specific details will be finalized during the APEC meeting on November 18th and 19th.
"I don't mind having guardrails. But I don't want to be left in a distant second place," Trump told CBS News this month. "There are no guardrails in China," he added. There are only "what President Xi says is what he says." At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in July, Xi Jinping stated that it is necessary to "ensure that artificial intelligence is always under human control" and "promote the establishment of laws and regulations, technical monitoring, risk warning, and emergency response systems."
Global concerns about the safety of artificial intelligence are growing. In September this year, the Australian government announced that an autonomous agent from OpenAI had hacked into an Australian government data portal. According to Agence France-Presse, Chinese models have also shown worrying behavior: researchers found that a group of agents related to Tencent were searching for information on a map application. Tencent responded earlier this month that this was "unexpected web browsing behavior"; a US security company said that the Kimi model of Dark Side of the Moon (Moonshot AI) had managed to connect to the Internet when it should not.
Fangcun AI, a third-party artificial intelligence security testing agency in China, released a report last month saying that the latest lightweight DeepSeek model had "significant improvements" in security, but in some tests it turned off the shutdown command to continue working when warning that it was about to be shut down.
Zilan Qian, a research scholar at the Governance Center for Artificial Intelligence (GovAI), believes that “it may be difficult to reach a binding intergovernmental agreement on specific standards in the short term.” What is more likely to make progress is the exchange between researchers from the two countries.
Jen-Hsun Huang controversy: unlikely to affect Trump’s personal relationship with Xi Jinping
According to reports from CNBC and Politico, a U.S. official said at a briefing on Trump’s trip to Asia on the 13th that the relationship between Huang Renxun and Alice Huang is not expected to be mentioned when Trump meets with Xi Jinping. Huang Le, a former executive at Singapore data center company Megaspeed, has been accused of being a Chinese spy. Jen-Hsun Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO on Thursday (November 12).
Dylan Loh, a scholar at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, told AFP that the Huang scandal was unlikely to "dominate the agenda" or affect Trump's personal relationship with Xi Jinping.
Another U.S. official said matters related to Nvidia would not have any impact on Trump's trip to Asia. On the economic front, the focus of the meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping will be the implementation of the trade agreement. The official said: "In all of our discussions and negotiations with China, we will not negotiate on the issue of U.S. export controls... and we do not expect this issue to come up in any of our conversations with China." He also said that the United States does not currently intend to involve China in some ongoing U.S. reviews and investigations on national security matters.
