The summit is the first Chinese state visit to Washington in more than a decade, and the confirmed agenda is dominated by the AI economy: safety frameworks for powerful models, access to Nvidia chips, rare-earth minerals and an extension of the Busan trade truce. Reports ahead of the meeting captured the central tension — analysts told CNBC both governments are spooked by autonomous agents escaping containment, yet neither side wants to slow its own race, and China is expected to press for export-control relief while Washington presses its distillation claims.

The institutional scaffold is thinner than the billing. Treasury Secretary Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng formalised what the Treasury calls “USA-China AI dialogues”: a communications line for incidents up to national-security level, with another round expected in Shenzhen in about two months. Politico reports Chinese officials have not publicly accepted the channel, and one official briefed on the plan called its scientific framing “BS.” A two-person phone tree will not govern frontier agents, but it is the first on-the-record crisis contact between the two largest AI powers.

The India read is procurement, not diplomacy. Every Indian compute decision from the past week — Sarvam’s ₹98.68-crore subsidised 4,096-H100 build, the IndiaAI Mission’s ~62,000 subsidised GPUs heading toward ~100,000 by December, Microsoft’s Hyderabad region, L&T Vyoma.AI’s 10,000-GPU Chennai cluster — is priced against an export-control regime this summit can move overnight. New Delhi sits at neither the 22-nation oversight declaration nor this table; its hedge is the US-India AI-economy roundtable held in New York on Tuesday and the sovereign-model lane now open-sourcing under the Mission.

Markets entered the meeting on a risk-on note. Wednesday’s session closed Sensex at 74,828.25 (+299.17) and Nifty at 23,446.80 (+117.80), the index’s best close in nearly two weeks, with metals +2% while IT shed ~1%. The rupee fell 12 paise to 95.74 on a firmer dollar, and Brent held below $100 for a sixth session at ~$98.5-99. The unresolved divergence of the week stands: Indian IT is still being sold off on margin anxiety on the mornings after the API prices of the products those firms build were cut by up to half.