Donald Trump meet in Beijing on May 14th-15th,
they may discuss such vexing problems as war in the Middle East, trade imbalances and the status of Taiwan.
Add to that cheering list artificial intelligence.
Elites in both Beijing and Washington are unnerved by the technology's rapid advance.
The smarter AI models become, the more vital they are for prosperity at home and geopolitical heft abroad.
But the risks they pose grow alongside.
Not since the creation of the atomic bomb have great powers faced such a dilemma.
The Trump administration increasingly recognises as much.
It has ditched its hands-off approach to tech regulation after recent sparring with Anthropic, an American lab,
and is considering ordering new models to be vetted by the government.
Anthropic said in April that it had created Mythos,
a model so capable at finding holes in cyber-defences that it could not be publicly released.
America and its rivals took note.
After initial scepticism, China's state media noted Mythos's "unprecedented cyber-attack capabilities",
while a Russian broadcaster called it "worse than a nuclear bomb".
Fears that ever more capable models may launch cyber-attacks, design bio-weapons or slip loose from human control
have made AI diplomacy urgent.
Some in America and China are quietly weighing whether they can agree on guardrails
for a technology that each regards as essential to beating the other.
Distrust abounds.