President Trump [AFP=Yonhap News]

Competition for hegemony in artificial intelligence (AI) technology is expected to be a major agenda item at the U.S.-China summit scheduled for this coming September.

U.S. President Donald Trump stated on the 23rd (local time), "President Xi is scheduled to visit (the U.S.) on September 24th," adding, "I talked about it (AI) when I was in Beijing, and we will talk about it again (at the next summit)."

While AI was also discussed during the summit held last May when President Trump made a state visit to Beijing, the specifics of those discussions were not disclosed. At the time, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced that they had "agreed to conduct government-to-government dialogue on AI."

If the two leaders exchange views on AI at the September summit, the recent controversy surrounding Chinese companies allegedly stealing AI technology from U.S. big tech firms may emerge as a key topic.

President Trump emphasized, "Whoever wins that (AI) race will be the ultimate winner. That’s it," and added that regarding AI technology, "We are ahead of China. We want to keep it that way."

"We are leading that race. We will maintain the lead unless we do something very stupid," he said. "We are ahead by a substantial margin."

Although President Trump did not explicitly mention the controversy over AI technology theft, his remark that "we must maintain our advantage over China" can be interpreted as having such issues in mind.

In this regard, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked at a briefing on the same day whether the controversy over Chinese companies stealing U.S. AI technology would be discussed at the September summit. She replied, "A wide range of topics is always covered (at summits)," and added, "We are certainly looking into the specific situation mentioned."

Previously, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned of potential countermeasures the day before, stating, "If Chinese companies engage in 'distillation' attacks by surreptitiously crossing the line into intellectual property (IP) theft on an industry-wide scale, we will consider sanctions and placement on export control lists."

This is interpreted as an offensive move against models such as the 'Kimi K3' released by Chinese startup Moonshot AI, which has reached a level comparable to the top-tier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, under the suspicion that they copied U.S. commercial AI models through unauthorized 'distillation.'

The event President Trump attended on this day was the 'Ratepayer Protection Pledge' ceremony held in Washington D.C. The core of the initiative is to ensure that big tech companies provide their own power plants so that citizens' electricity bills do not rise amidst a surge in power demand from the construction of AI data centers.

President Trump claimed that while China produces the power needed for AI data centers in a "traditional way," there are those in the U.S. advocating for renewable energy like wind power, calling this an incitement by "radical left-wing communists."

"They will stop all new development. They will kill our most successful industries. They will wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs. And they will hand the AI race to China," he said.

He further remarked, appearing to target China: "I respect President Xi very much, but we represent the United States. (They) want local communities to reject these projects as much as possible because they want to get ahead in the (AI) race."