Trump to head to China for high-stakes talks with Xi – US politics live

Donald Trump is heading to China this week. If his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping, Blake Montgomery reports.

On Monday, news broke that outgoing Apple CEO, Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, would join the US president. Other guests from the tech sphere include Meta’s recently appointed president, Dina Powell McCormick; Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of computer memory maker Micron; Chuck Robbins, CEO of longtime telecom giant Cisco; and Cristiano Amon, CEO of semiconductor maker Qualcomm, according to a White House official.

Whether Trump’s trip will foster a flurry of tech deals, as his Middle East visit did in May 2025, will have to be seen. But while Trump trots out the US’s best and brightest business people – products of his hands-free policy for fostering technological innovation – his administration is taking cues from China’s more stringent approach to AI. China’s laws require AI companies to submit their models to Beijing for review on both security and political sensitivity grounds. The stringent policies prohibit not only threats to national security but also the generation of content that Beijing finds objectionable.

Read more of Blake’s analysis here:

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of US politics.

**Donald Trump is heading to Beijing for high-stakes talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping,**as they seek to maintain a tentative trade truce while navigating Iran, Taiwan and dominance over global supply chains.

The Iran conflict could serve as a potential source of tension during talks. The US president has sought help from China, a close ally of Iran and the world’s biggest buyer of Iranian oil, to Trump’s first visit to China in nearly nine years in the hopes that the US-Israeli war against Iran would be over, and it comes a week after Beijing flaunted its close ties with Tehran by hosting the Iranian foreign minister,