Morning edition — reporting checked through 6:05 a.m. ET, September 20, 2026.
Scott Bessent, Jamieson Greer and China’s He Lifeng are due to begin an all-day meeting at 10:30 a.m. today at JPMorgan’s Manhattan headquarters. The building is the secure venue, not a participant. The aim is modest agreements before Xi Jinping’s White House visit later this week; the current trade truce expires November 10. Reuters, September 20
The agenda connects three things usually discussed separately: tariffs, the inadequate flow of Chinese rare-earth magnets, and guardrails for both open- and closed-weight AI models. Bessent has explicitly said the US wants to discuss open weights, whose lower cost is helping Chinese models find American users. Rare earths sit underneath the same contest because advanced chips and their supply chains need them.
The likely outcome is continuity dressed as progress. Both sides have incentives to produce something presentable for the summit without reopening the tariff escalation that reached triple digits before the 2025 truce. The important signal will be whether “AI guardrails” becomes a defined mechanism—with actors, thresholds and verification—or remains diplomatic vocabulary for agreeing that uncontrolled models are dangerous.