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Nayan Seth

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer held their final preparatory talks with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York on Sunday to work out deliverables for next week’s summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump in Washington.
The leaders are meeting at JP Morgan’s headquarters in the city to discuss possible economic outcomes for the summit and begin their long-awaited dialogue on artificial intelligence safety and governance.
The latest meeting mirrored those in May, when Bessent and He held talks in Seoul just days before Trump met Xi in Beijing.
Major economic items on the agenda include discussions on renewing the Busan agreement on rare earths and the possible implementation of the US-China Board of Trade, which would create a tariff-reduced trade mechanism in non-sensitive sectors between the two sides.
Last week, the South China Morning Post reported that Washington and Beijing would fold AI discussions into a broader economic meeting.

The two leaders agreed in Beijing in May to establish an intergovernmental dialogue on AI, which ran separately from the economic talks led by Bessent and He for months.
The AI channel has struggled to make progress because the two sides differ over the meeting’s agenda and scope. The US side wanted to focus narrowly on AI safety and the technology’s risks, while China sought a broader conversation on global AI governance.
On Tuesday, Bessent weighed in on the AI safety debate, highlighting the tension between addressing concerns about the risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems and maintaining US competitiveness with China in the race for AI leadership.
“It does matter whether the good guys or the bad guys have this,” Bessent said in response to Massachusetts Democrat Stephen Lynch, who argued it probably wouldn’t matter whether the good or bad guys developed superintelligence if it couldn’t be controlled.
Trump on Monday dismissed growing concerns about AI, claiming America already has guardrails to regulate the industry and warning that casting doubt on development only benefits China.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ ‌that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on social media.


“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these ⁠companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data ‌Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China.”
In the run-up to the Bessent-He meeting, Washington has repeatedly criticised Beijing for allowing Chinese AI companies to distil technology from US models, raising concerns over the use of American AI systems to accelerate their own development.
“One of the ways we can push back against China, because the Chinese models distil from the US models, which is a polite scientific word for steal,” Bessent said on Tuesday.
“As a person who manages the relationship with China on AI, it matters a great deal.”

Model distillation is a widely used AI training technique in which a smaller model learns from the output of larger ones.
The Chinese embassy in Washington rejected US allegations, terming distillation “a common technical practice used by AI developers worldwide, including US companies”.
As Chinese companies have closed the gap with US firms in frontier AI models, US firms and Trump administration officials have increasingly accused Beijing of using American technology to accelerate the development of its own AI systems.
On the economic front, both sides are discussing the list of possible outcomes – the likely operationalisation of the US-China Board of Trade and selection of sectors under the mechanism – and exchanging views on the extension of the Busan trade deal.
The SCMP previously reported that the bilateral trade truce agreed by Xi and Trump in Busan, South Korea, in October 2025 was likely to be extended, though Washington was not expected to push for a breakthrough at the coming meeting.

At the time, the two sides agreed on a package deal that included lower US tariffs on some Chinese goods, a suspension of additional US restrictions on Chinese-affiliated companies, a one-year pause on certain Chinese rare earth export controls, and Chinese commitments on US soybeans and fentanyl precursors.
On Friday, the White House raised concerns over the flow of rare earths from China and said it would be a part of Sunday’s discussion.
“China’s performance in that respect has not been up to par of what we would expect,” a senior White House official said.
The creation of the Board of Trade was also announced in May following Trump’s visit to Beijing, alongside a new Board of Investment, as mechanisms for managing business ties between the world’s two largest economies.
Under the trade mechanism, both sides are selecting non-sensitive sectors and products eligible for a tariff-reduced trade capped at US$30 billion for each side.
The SCMP also reported last month that the Board of Trade was likely to be operationalised during Xi’s visit, even as discussions on the investment forum remained stalled.

On Thursday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi also held a phone call with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“Wang Yi stressed that the two sides should act in the spirit of equality, respect and mutual benefit” and “make good preparations for high-level engagement in the next stage,” Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said on social media.
He also called on the two sides to “send a positive message that China and the United States are committed to advancing a constructive relationship of strategic stability and jointly promoting world peace and development”.


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Top US, Chinese economic officials gather in New York for preparatory talks about strategic concerns


Top US, Chinese economic officials gather in New York for preparatory talks about strategic concerns.


US, China seek Xi-Trump summit deliverables in New York talks

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Top US, Chinese economic officials gather in New York for preparatory talks about strategic concerns

Top US, Chinese economic officials gather in New York for preparatory talks about strategic concerns