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Economy, business and finance
Trump to host Xi Jinping at White House: Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Tim Cook among state dinner guests
White House will hold a state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping next week. The dinner is likely to be attended by several business tycoons, including Apple Inc. Executive Chairman Tim Cook and OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman.
US President Donald Trump said earlier he will host a state dinner for Xi Jinping when the Chinese leader visits the White House on September 24.
"We're going to have a state dinner, and we're going to do great things with China," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
“He’s a great gentleman, we get along great, we have a very good trading relationship, and you know, they’re a competitor and all of that, but we have a very good relationship with President Xi,” Trump said.
“He’s coming with his beautiful wife, she’s a beautiful woman and a great woman, respected all over the world, they’re coming together,” Trump added.
A person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that Cook would be at the event, which US President Donald Trump is holding in Washington. OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, confirmed that Altman was attending.
The White House didn’t immediately confirm whether Altman would be in attendance.
Other business leaders who are likely to attend the dinner including Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang, Bloomberg News reported.
Altman’s expected appearance comes as a heated exchange over artificial intelligence regulation unfolds in Washington and Silicon Valley after researchers warned of the risks to humanity and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in frontier model development.
Sources were also quoted as saying that Chinese officials are considering BYD Co. for a possible business delegation joining Xi Jinping’s summit with Donald Trump next week in Washington.
US President Donald Trump will meet Xi Jinping in Washington next week. The Chinese president will arrive in the US for his state visit on September 24. China hasn’t confirmed dates for Xi’s travel yet, something it tends to do only days in advance.
The summit comes at a delicate moment for US-Chinese relations — and the artificial intelligence industry. Geopolitical tensions are simmering over the AI race, international trade and the Middle East. Trump said earlier this week that he maintains a “great relationship” with Xi.
State dinners are among the highest diplomatic honors a US president can bestow on a foreign leader and are typically reserved for heads of allied nations.
Hosting a state dinner for Xi is notable because Trump often characterises China as a rival. Xi hosted a state dinner for Trump when he visited the country in May.
Huang attended that gathering, as did SpaceX CEO and former Trump adviser Elon Musk and former Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Trump has hosted one state dinner since his second term began, for Britain's King Charles and Queen Camilla.
The US and China are discussing slashing tariffs on certain goods.
US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Fox News this month that he expected to see “announcements on agriculture and non-tariff barriers related to agriculture” during Xi’s visit.
Greer also said he expected the Board of Trade to make other announcements on toys, games and fireworks that might protect them from future tariffs or other trade measures.
The meetings between the two sides are also likely to result in an agreement to lower duties on Chinese inputs for manufacturers, sources were quoted as saying. The moves are expected to be carried out under an earlier plan for reciprocal tariff cuts on roughly $30 billion in trade.
Trump's Iran war casts a long shadow too, as China seeks to avoid US sanctions against countries dealing with Tehran, despite reports that Beijing supplied Tehran with intelligence for a strike on US troops.
Notably, China has been the main buyer of Iran’s oil, and Beijing has resisted Trump’s calls to cut off trade with Iran, as the US president seeks to increase economic pressure on Tehran to force them to cut a deal that would end the conflict that has stretched more than six months.
With regard to Iran, “I said ‘please don’t get involved’ to President Xi — I have a very good relationship — and they’re not really involved,” Trump told reporters Friday in the Oval Office.
According to Bloomberg, there's a potential sign that the leaders’ summit next week will lead to an extension of the one-year trade truce. "The two leaders are more likely to simply extend a relative truce rather than produce any concrete results, like when Xi hosted Trump in Beijing four months ago," experts told AFP.
Any major deals are "politically out of reach for now," said Wang Dong, a professor at Peking University, as Beijing and Washington both fear losing out in the race for AI dominance.
For his state visit in May, Trump brought more than a dozen CEOs to China, including Nvidia Corp.’s Jensen Huang and Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk. The executives met with Li Qiang, and Xi told them that US enterprises “are deeply involved in China’s reform and opening up, a process from which both sides have benefited.”
During Xi’s last state visit to the US in 2015, he brought a delegation of prominent Chinese CEOs. Back then, tech leaders such as Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma and Tencent’s Pony Ma accompanied him, as well as executives from Chinese state-owned companies and banks.
Trump and Xi are expected to meet in November at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Shenzen, China. The Kremlin has suggested a three-way meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump is meanwhile expected to invite Xi to the G20 summit in December at his Doral resort in Miami.
(With inputs from AFP, Bloomberg)
