As US President Donald Trump prepares to travel to Beijing for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping on May 14-15, five experts from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) have published a joint analysis arguing that China enters the meeting holding the stronger hand. The assessment, published on May 10, 2026, covers five dimensions of the US-China relationship: the economic agenda, Taiwan, Iran, artificial intelligence, and critical minerals.
The analysis is notable for its candor about the limits of US leverage. It argues that Xi Jinping has successfully beaten back Trump’s unprecedented trade escalation, which pushed tariffs past 140 percent, by wielding China’s control over rare earth minerals and magnets. When Beijing threatened to restrict those flows in April and October 2025, Trump pulled back rather than escalate further. The result, according to CFR senior fellow Rush Doshi, is “an uneasy détente, albeit one favoring Beijing.”
Beijing’s Strategy: “Managing” Washington
Doshi, the C.V. Starr Senior Fellow for Asia Studies and Director of the China Strategy Initiative at CFR, argues that Beijing’s overarching goal at the summit is not to reach a grand bargain, but to “manage” the United States, inducing Trump to delay necessary competitive steps in exchange for the optics of bilateral stability.
On the economic agenda, Doshi writes that China’s aim is to “buy more time to consolidate its technological and industrial position and reignite its faltering economy,” while the US aim is “probably to secure symbolic wins rather than more meaningful structural reforms to China’s economic model.” He warns that any headline Chinese investment commitment “may not ultimately be credible,” citing the $83.7 billion West Virginia memorandum of understanding from Trump’s 2017 Beijing visit, which exceeded the state’s entire GDP and never materialized.
This context is critical for understanding the AI dimension of the summit. China is not seeking a genuine partnership on AI safety; it is seeking to use the appearance of cooperation to reduce pressure and gain access to US technology.
The AI Talks: Targeted Dialogue, Maximum Pressure
The AI section of the CFR analysis is written by Chris McGuire, a Senior Fellow for China and Emerging Technologies. His assessment is notably cautious. While he acknowledges that the US and China have a shared interest in preventing the release of AI models with certain dangerous capabilities, he argues that “the Chinese government’s actual willingness to make and abide by robust AI safety commitments is low.”
McGuire points to the 2024 AI safety dialogue as a cautionary example. The United States sent technical experts to outline shared risks; China sent diplomats to complain about export controls on AI chips. He argues that Beijing views these dialogues “primarily as an opportunity to expand China’s access to US technology and close the AI gap.”
His recommendation is a strategy of “maximum pressure with dialogue,” maintaining strict export controls while pursuing targeted, technical-level discussions on specific AI safety risks. This approach, he argues, “not only preserves US AI leadership, it’s also the best way to achieve long-term AI safety.” This aligns with McGuire’s earlier CFR analysis, which warned against trading away AI leverage for superficial commitments.
The summit may build on the foundation laid by the Biden-Xi summits in 2023 and 2024, which produced a working-level AI dialogue and an agreement not to connect AI to nuclear command and control systems. However, the CFR analysis suggests that any new deliverables on AI will be modest.
The Broader Context: Iran, Taiwan, and Critical Minerals
The CFR analysis makes clear that AI is just one of several contentious issues on the summit agenda, and not necessarily the most urgent. The Iran war looms large: the US Navy is blockading the Strait of Hormuz and intercepting tankers bound for China, Iran’s largest crude buyer, while Beijing is providing political and possibly intelligence support to Tehran.
Taiwan is another major flashpoint. The CFR’s David Sacks notes that Chinese scholars suggest Beijing will press for a shift in US declaratory policy — specifically, an explicit statement opposing Taiwan independence rather than merely “not supporting” it. The Trump administration has already delayed a major arms package to Taiwan, and Trump has publicly acknowledged discussing arms sales with Xi.
On critical minerals, CFR Senior Fellow Heidi Crebo-Rediker argues that China’s dominance over rare earths and magnets gives Beijing a powerful economic weapon that it has already demonstrated a willingness to use. This leverage will be a constant undercurrent in every aspect of the summit negotiations.
Implications for the AI Race
The CFR analysis has direct implications for the trajectory of the US-China AI race. If Trump makes significant concessions on chip export controls, for instance, in exchange for superficial AI safety commitments, it could provide China’s AI ecosystem with a boost at a critical moment.
Conversely, a summit that produces no progress on AI governance could accelerate the fragmentation of global AI development into two incompatible ecosystems, each with its own standards, models, and infrastructure. As the White House has accused China of “industrial-scale” AI theft ahead of the summit, the atmosphere for productive AI dialogue is, at best, deeply challenging.