As Trump Meets Xi, Experts Say China Targets Weak Spots In Western Tech

Experts warn that China is gaining ground in the artificial intelligence race as the world’s two largest competitors meet to discuss the technology.

As President Donald Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington, D.C. for Thursday’s summit, China may pull ahead by putting AI to work and leading in open-source models, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. This summit, which is the second meeting between the world leaders this year, follows the Trump administration’s recent proposal for an AI incident “notification mechanism” with Beijing, the Associated Press reported Sunday.

“[W]here the U.S. has advanced its [science and technology] enterprise, China has invested in the application of what exists today … Because of that, they’ve been able to work out a lot of the kinks around how to apply it in effective ways,” Jason Rathje, a former Biden administration Department of Defense official, told the DCNF. “[W]hile I can’t discuss anything related to where I’ve seen China use AI from a national security perspective … it just seems that they’ve been focused on the application layer, as opposed to just the scientific advancement of the technology itself.”

Rathje is the president of public sector at webAI, an Austin-based private U.S. AI company which says it can “create personalized models that are tailored to your work” and that run on local devices, according to the company’s website.

“[W]e, at webAI, are actively engaging in open source models, and we’re pacing off of where China is, right? Because they are leading in the open source category,” Rathje told the DCNF.

Regarding the summit, Rathje warned against any outcome that holds back U.S. open-source AI developers.

“[W]hat I hope to see coming out of this [summit] is a renewed or continued advancement of U.S. open source models as we think towards making sure the U.S. can maintain technological superiority, not just at the frontier, but also in the application itself … I don’t want to see anything that regulates or slows down our ability to compete in the open source domain,” Rathje told the DCNF.

The White House and the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment

Thomas Duesterberg, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, argued that China’s push into the open-source AI market is a direct response to U.S. export controls.