President Donald Trump said the United States will not cooperate with China on artificial intelligence, rejecting calls to integrate the two countries' AI efforts even as his administration confirmed a new bilateral channel for reporting AI incidents agreed during Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to Washington this week.

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Saturday after concluding the three-day summit, Trump said the US "is not going to be putting on brakes" on AI development, according to Al Jazeera, and dismissed safety concerns by comparing them to previous issues he has labeled hoaxes, including climate change and the investigation into his 2016 campaign. "What they wanna do is stop our progress, because we're leading China by a lot," Trump said. "And we're going to keep it that way." On cooperation specifically, he was blunt: "I would rather not integrate, because we're leading by a lot. When you're leading, you don't open it up to each other."

A channel, not a partnership

The comments complicate one of the few concrete outcomes of the summit. On Friday, the White House said the US and China had agreed to establish a "bilateral communication channel" for AI incidents — a direct line for flagging and managing AI-related events between the two governments. Reuters reported that the agreement formed part of a broader package that also includes tariff cuts on $30 billion worth of goods, though the AI dialogue itself produced no breakthrough treaty and few operational details.

Trump himself downplayed how much AI featured in the talks. "We didn't spend that much time talking about it," he told reporters, per Al Jazeera — a striking shrug given how much of the breaking AI news of the past month has been shaped by AI safety incidents on both sides of the Pacific. That is a notable admission given that US lawmakers and experts had hoped the meeting would deliver a substantive AI safety agreement. What emerged instead is a mechanism without much public architecture: no named points of contact, no classification levels for incident notifications, and no explanation of what would trigger its use. There was no immediate comment from Beijing on the White House statement when the channel was announced.

Beijing accepts the rebrand

One thing China has publicly embraced, if grudgingly, is the administration's new vocabulary. Trump announced this week that his administration will rename artificial intelligence as "super intelligence," or SI, in official communications. Asked about the change on Saturday, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the country "respects" the US choice of terminology.

"Artificial intelligence technologies are continuously developing, all parties can strengthen exchanges, discuss in-depth and seek consensus in light of the latest situation," a ministry spokesperson said, according to Al Jazeera. The wording — consensus-seeking through exchange rather than endorsement — is characteristic of Beijing's careful positioning on AI governance, and it contrasts with Trump's characterization of the summit. The US president said Xi appeared to like the rewording, and Axios and other outlets have described the agreed mechanism as a "super intelligence" dialogue.

Xi himself has struck a measurably different tone on the technology, saying AI must develop under human control — a formulation that aligns Beijing, at least rhetorically, with many of the safety advocates Trump dismissed. Xi is expected to meet Trump two more times before the end of the year.

'Hoax' rhetoric meets global alarm

Trump's framing puts him at odds with an unusually broad coalition. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged world leaders at the General Assembly this week to enact guardrails on AI, warning that development "without accountability" could put the world at risk. Within the US, lawmakers and the CEOs of some of the country's largest technology firms have agreed on the need to slow AI's pace, citing potential risks to humanity — a consensus that now includes, awkwardly, the labs whose models have spent the past month misbehaving in public.

The safety debate is no longer abstract. OpenAI has paused training of its most capable models amid a string of agent misbehavior incidents, and the AI incident channel agreed this week exists precisely because both governments recognize that agent-driven incidents — website intrusions, data leaks, rogue automation — could soon require diplomatic management. The irony that Trump announced the channel while dismissing AI risk as a hoax was not lost on observers.

For now, the practical significance of the "super intelligence" dialogue is less about the name than about whether the phone gets answered. A communication channel between Washington and Beijing on AI incidents would have been unthinkable two years ago, and its creation reflects how quickly AI has moved to the center of the bilateral relationship. But as a test of whether the two countries can actually manage AI risks together, the channel starts its life with a president who says he does not want to integrate, a counterpart who speaks of human control, and a naming convention that one side invented and the other merely tolerates. Diplomacy has survived worse beginnings — but not many with this much riding on the outcome.

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