Donald Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping wrapped up their Washington summit on Friday, facing criticism that they had squandered an opportunity to pause their countries’ artificial intelligence (AI) arms race.

The three-day state visit emphasised pageantry and personal rapport rather than substantial agreements. The US president and Xi discussed the wars in Iran and Ukraine and the status of Taiwan. Their biggest policy announcement was a modest two-month extension of a trade truce.

But despite the presence of top tech executives at a White House state dinner on Thursday night, Trump and Xi failed to deliver the AI breakthrough that some experts and foreign governments had hoped for amid warnings that the technology could pose an existential threat to humanity.

“It was such a layup,” said Ro Khanna, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives’ select committee on China. “If [Trump] had just said, look, we have established technical working groups and we’ve agreed to a framework that has called for DeepSeek and Moonshot and Alibaba to sit down with Anthropic and OpenAI and Gemini and with technical experts and they’re going to commit to at least a pause on any self-improving AI, he could have looked like he was a statesman taking the lead.