Air Force One landed in Beijing this week with a delegation that effectively maps how the US President thinks about AI (and his own business interests). Tim Cook was on board. Elon Musk was on board. Jensen Huang was added on Tuesday morning after a direct call from Trump and joined the flight at the Alaska refuel. Meta sent its vice chair Dina Powell McCormick, while the other three Mag7 names from Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon were not represented at all. Nor were OpenAI or Anthropic. The only frontier AI name on the plane was Huang, and Nvidia sells hardware rather than models.
Alongside those three Mag7 CEOs sat Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, Jane Fraser of Citi, David Solomon of Goldman, Sanjay Mehrotra of Micron, Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm, and Kelly Ortberg of Boeing. Every executive on the plane either builds hardware that moves through Chinese factories, sells devices to Chinese consumers, or runs capital that needs Chinese counterparties. The people whose business is trained models and inference APIs were not there, because the American AI services layer has very little working relationship with China left to negotiate over.
While the delegation was in the air, Dario Amodei and his policy team were in Washington arguing that allowing Chinese labs to close the capability gap is a security problem and that chip export controls should be tightened rather than loosened. Anthropic has held that line publicly for more than a year. Huang spent the same week pushing for H200 deliveries to the ten cleared Chinese buyers to actually move. Two American AI companies, in the same week, put two opposing demands on the same President.
But by the time the summit closed on Friday, Nvidia’s position in China was no clearer than when the plane had landed. Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, told Bloomberg that chip export controls had not been a major topic at the bilateral meeting at all, leaving Huang’s H200 problem essentially where it started. Trump approved H200 exports back in December, and five months on, not a single chip has shipped because Chinese regulators have yet to greenlight a purchase. Huang flew to Beijing to unstick that, and left with the same standoff he arrived with.
The wider AI relationship did edge forward. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that the two sides had agreed to set up a guardrails protocol for the most powerful models, aimed at keeping non-state actors away from frontier capabilities, and framed the conversation as one Washington could afford to have only because “we are in the lead”.
The US AI industry no longer has a single position on China. The hardware tier wants access and revenue. The frontier labs are split between those pushing for containment, with Anthropic the loudest voice, and those who prefer optionality. The hyperscalers have largely conceded the Chinese market and are focused elsewhere. The application layer was not part of this week’s conversation.
Takeaways: The summit produced no firm endorsement of Taiwan, and Trump’s instinct to align with the strongest leader in the room was on full display. He declared that “nobody needs a war”, apparently without irony, while the question of who controls the island that fabricates over 90% of the world’s advanced AI silicon went conspicuously unanswered. An invasion or blockade of Taiwan remains the single most disruptive potential event in the global economy and the AI supply chain. The risk of existential hardware disruption has not diminished this week. For any organisation building serious AI capability, an inference and silicon backup plan is as important as it has ever been.