China's 'respect' for Trump's AI label masks a hollow trade truce
By Tom Beckwith · Reporting from Washington ·
President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping agreed to rebrand AI and cut tariffs, but the cosmetic shift in language fails to address the underlying strategic competition.
The rebranding of artificial intelligence as "super intelligence" is a vanity project masquerading as diplomacy. Beijing's "respect" for the term is a polite shrug. It is a low-cost concession designed to grease the wheels of a transactional trade truce. President Donald Trump believes the word "artificial" makes the technology sound "fake." He has decided that a change in vocabulary constitutes a diplomatic win. In reality, it is theater.
The vocabulary of vanity
The White House claims that President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping agreed to use "super intelligence" in place of "artificial intelligence." Fox News reports that China's Foreign Ministry "respects" this decision. However, Chinese officials have not adopted the term in their own government communications.
This is the classic language of a diplomatic cable: the statement is a courtesy, but the action is absent. Beijing is happy to let Washington change its dictionary if it keeps the trade war at bay. The two leaders also agreed to a dialogue on AI risks and a communication channel for incidents. These are procedural placeholders. They signal cooperation to domestic audiences while the actual competition for computational dominance continues unabated.
The transactional truce
The real currency of the Washington summit was not nomenclature, but tariffs. SBS News reports that the two countries agreed to reduce tariffs on $30 billion of non-sensitive goods in each direction. This includes US exports of agricultural goods, wood, and cosmetics. In return, the US will lower tariffs on Chinese small appliances, toys, and decorations.
This move follows the exact mechanism of the Phase One Trade Agreement. Both then and now, the administration used targeted tariff reductions and temporary truces to manage a high-stakes rivalry. The goal is to defer structural technology disputes to future dialogue. In 2020, this approach failed because China did not meet its import targets. The current arrangement, which extends a trade truce through November 10, is a repeat of that pattern. It treats a systemic geopolitical struggle as a series of ledger entries.
The strategic gap
While the leaders discuss labels, the capabilities gap remains the only metric that matters. Sen. Ted Cruz called winning the AI race "the single most important economic question facing America today." He warns that Chinese dominance would focus AI on espionage and surveillance.
The evidence supports this fear. OpenAI recently banned two clusters of ChatGPT accounts from China. These accounts ran covert influence operations to manipulate American tech policy debates.
The friction between the two capitals extends far beyond data centers. Presidential Determination No. 2026-23 identifies China as the world's largest producer of precursor chemicals for fentanyl. This is a hard security interest. It cannot be solved by a "super intelligence" label or a trade council. The Kuala Lumpur Joint Arrangement established a framework for stability, but it did not resolve the underlying theft of intellectual property.
The current summit is a performance of stability. The US and China are agreeing to talk in November and support each other at the G20. These are the boring years of diplomacy where credibility is supposed to be earned. But credibility requires a word that means something. When a superpower agrees to a name change to save a few billion in toy tariffs, the word means very little.
The newly established AI communication channel will become a pro forma talking shop. It will serve as a diplomatic vent while both capitals quietly intensify their restrictions on the other. The tariff reductions will likely be extended past November without resolving the flow of illicit chemicals or industrial subsidies. In five years, the world will not remember what the technology was called. It will only remember who controlled the hardware and who wrote the code.