President Donald Trump confirmed on Thursday that Chinese President Xi Jinping will travel to Washington for a state visit on 24 September, with artificial intelligence set to dominate the agenda. The announcement came as senior US officials accused the Chinese AI firm Moonshot AI of illicitly obtaining American technology and threatened to impose sanctions or add the company to a trade blacklist. The dual-track development — a high-level diplomatic engagement alongside a sharp escalation in tech rivalry — frames the state of play between the world’s two largest economies ahead of the visit.

From Washington’s perspective, the visit is an opportunity to press concerns over what it describes as systematic Chinese efforts to close the AI gap through unfair means. White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios alleged that Moonshot AI used a technique known as distillation to train its newly released Kimi K3 model on outputs from Anthropic’s Fable system, calling the practice “unacceptable” when conducted covertly and at industrial scale. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent separately wrote that sanctions and a listing on the Entity List were under consideration. The accusations land as a Pew Research Center survey shows 36 per cent of Americans now believe China is more advanced in AI than the United States, compared with only 12 per cent who see the US as the leader — a perception gap that adds domestic pressure on the administration to act.

Beijing has rejected the allegations and warned against the politicisation of technology. A foreign ministry spokesperson said such moves would “hinder the global development of artificial intelligence” and serve neither side’s interests. The Chinese leader, meanwhile, has sought to position the country as a proponent of international cooperation: Xi Jinping last week announced the creation of a World AI Cooperation Organisation (WAICO) with 29 participating nations, describing AI development as “a symphony of international cooperation, not a solo performance by one country.” Chinese and US diplomats, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, have held preparatory talks aimed at ensuring a “very positive visit,” according to US readouts.

The September meeting is the centrepiece of a year of intensive diplomacy between the two leaders, who also plan encounters at the G20 summit in Miami and possibly the APEC forum in China. Yet the substance of the AI discussion will be shaped by the unresolved dispute over technology transfer. Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model, which is open-source and cheaper than rival American systems, threatens the commercial models of firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which are preparing initial public offerings at valuations near one trillion dollars. Whether the visit can produce even a limited framework for managing AI competition remains uncertain; for now, the US side is signalling that it will not decouple the diplomatic track from the enforcement of export controls and sanctions.