The empty chairs were the AI story

East/West AIpha · Edition 18 · Tuesday, September 29, 2026

Last week Xi Jinping made his first state visit to Washington since 2015. He left with eight agreed outcomes, better tariff terms on $30 billion of non-sensitive goods each way, a new AI dialogue, and a promise of two pandas for Zoo Atlanta.

To be fair, the full chairs produced real things. China's list of eight outcomes includes a Board of Trade, the tariff deal, a longer trade truce, joint anti-drug cases with dozens of arrests, the AI dialogue, the pandas, and pledges to attend each other's APEC (Shenzhen, November) and G20 (Miami, December) summits. The militaries also promised to finish a crisis-communication memorandum "as soon as possible." The White House says a Board of Investment is now running. Beijing's list does not mention it.

Everyone covered the full chairs. The real story was who sat in them.

Three sets of chairs sat empty around Xi's first state visit to Washington in eleven years. The Chinese tech CEOs never made it to the state dinner table. The AI talks were planned for weeks without anyone able to say whether private companies would even be allowed in the room. And across the Chinese internet, the visit filled every feed while the comment sections sat dark and empty.

The two countries that lead the world in AI agreed to keep talking. At dinner, America seated its model builders: Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sundar Pichai of Google. China seated only officials. That is the AI story of the summit, and it matters more for your money than anything that was announced on stage.

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One more set sat empty, and this one is ours.

In every edition so far, the Eastern models have answered everything we asked them. For this issue, we asked Kimi, Moonshot's model, to read this draft, check it against Chinese sources, and comment on the summit. It opened our visuals. It queried the Caixin database. It ran the checks. Then the answer came back: "Sorry, I cannot provide this information. Please feel free to ask another question."

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The model did the work. The system would not let it speak. Read that silence as data. When the builders will not even discuss the table, you know exactly how political the table has become.

This is the first edition we have reported half-blind. It will not be the last. The next test comes in November, when the two sides hold their first AI dialogue under the new channel. We will be watching who walks into that room, and which chairs stay empty.

Start with the table everyone photographed. The White House laid on the full ritual: Trump broke decades of protocol to greet Xi personally on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, two B-1 bombers flew overhead as six F-22s and six F-16s sat parked on the tarmac, the state dinner poured the same sparkling wine served at Nixon's 1972 "peace toast," and Trump invoked a Chinese word in his remarks during the visit: 工合 (gong he), "work together." China's workers were not seated. In the weeks before the summit, sources told the South China Morning Post that BYD (比亚迪), Xiaomi (小米), and Zhongji Innolight (中际旭创) were likely on the guest list for Xi's trip, a business delegation meant to mirror the dozen-plus American CEOs who accompanied Trump to Beijing in May. Then the plan stalled. Days before the dinner, SCMP reported the Chinese executives had flown to the US on their own, not with Xi's official party, and were still awaiting invitations to Trump's state dinner. A separate SCMP exclusive put it more bluntly: a split over US investments had stalled the Chinese business visit, with

Compare the symmetry. In May, Trump walked into Beijing flanked by more than a dozen American chief executives. In September, Xi walked into the White House with his officials, his wife, and a business delegation that could not get clarity on its dinner invitations. The couples showed. America's companies showed. China's did not. The optics were magnificent. The substance sat a table short.

When the two largest economies negotiate the terms of technological competition, who gets a chair is the negotiation. It tells you capital still cannot move freely between the two systems. SCMP's phrase, "fissures over US investments," is not a scheduling problem. It is the frontier.

Note one commercial deal that did get done: China Gas Holdings (中国燃气) signed a twenty-year LNG contract with Venture Global, announced just before the summit. Energy flows. Molecules move. It is the weightless stuff that cannot get a dinner invitation.

Commandment Four: Don't Be a Dead Fish. "Dead fish go with the flow. Live fish swim."

Everyone floated downstream last week with the state-dinner story: the toasts, the pandas, the $30 billion. D

ead fish go with the flow. The investor looks upstream, at the chairs nobody sat in

The AI deliverable of the summit sounds substantial until you read it closely. The two sides agreed to establish a US-China AI dialogue, to exchange views on AI risks and benefits, to hold the next round in November, and to set up a communication channel for AI incidents. Beijing's commerce ministry said a first AI dialogue had already taken place ahead of the summit. Vice Premier He Lifeng had flown to New York days earlier to meet Treasury Secretary Bessent, and Senator Steve Daines had been shuttling as a backchannel, even touring Chinese AI and aerospace firms. The plumbing was being laid.

But the commercial plumbing was not. In August, Sean Stein, president of the US-China Business Council, told SCMP that neither side had even started consultations on the joint Board of Investment. So the pattern held at every level: the officials met, the business councils did not. The chairs reserved for commerce stayed empty while the chairs reserved for ceremony filled up.

Now read what the same newspapers were reporting a month earlier. On August 19, SCMP reported that "basic details of planned AI talks remain uncertain," with open questions over which US agencies would take the lead, whether

So the timeline is: weeks of not knowing who would be in the room, then a dialogue mechanism, a November date, and an incident hotline. That is a diplomatic result, not a technological one. It lowers the risk of accidents. It sets no standards, funds no joint research, moves no chips, and trains no models.

Then there is the vocabulary problem. When the American side presented the summit's outcomes, it used the term "superintelligence" where the Chinese side said 人工智能 (artificial intelligence). China's foreign ministry noted politely that it respects the American formulation. Respect is good. It is not agreement. When two parties cannot use the same noun for the thing they are discussing, they are not yet discussing the same thing.

Chinese commentators call the two countries 两骑绝尘 (liang qi jue chen) in AI: two riders who have left the pack in the dust. That part is true. What the summit showed is that the two riders have now agreed to wave at each other from a safe distance and to install a hotline in case the horses collide. Nobody handed anyone a shared map.

But one side's strengths, the labs, the weights, the engineers, were not in the room. A dialogue

A different set of empty chairs. Bloomberg reported on September 20 that TikTok's US operations are to be spun into a new joint venture, with ByteDance retaining no more than 19.9 percent and Oracle and other US investors taking the rest. Beijing's trade ministry responded that it respects companies making decisions consistent with market rules, while insisting the terms must comply with Chinese law, including export controls on technology.

Now read the two statements side by side. Oracle's TikTok deal is structured to keep the algorithm's training and improvement in American hands. China's export-control regime claims the algorithm cannot leave without Beijing's approval. One chair holds an American joint venture; the other holds a Chinese technology license. They cannot both be occupied.

The emptiness is the point. TikTok is the single largest US-China technology asset whose ownership is being forcibly restructured, and the two governments are describing different transactions. Investors pricing TikTok's American business are pricing an American asset. Investors pricing ByteDance are pricing a company whose crown jewel may not legally leave the country. Somebody's chair is imaginary.

Everyone floated downstream with the deal-announcement story. The investor looks upstream: the chairs at the negotiating table for the

The fourth set belongs to the people who price all this. SCMP reported on September 14 that Chinese listings in the US were "on tenterhooks" ahead of the summit, waiting to see whether audit agreements would hold. That is a market chair: the listing venue exists, the capital is committed, and the rules that let the two meet are renegotiated every few years by people who do not own the shares.

Notice what happened to the fear trade. The VIX barely moved. Markets priced the summit as ceremony, and ceremony is what they got. The empty chairs were already priced in. Nobody was betting on the business delegation getting dinner invitations, because nobody expected the structural question, who gets to own what, to be answered over dessert.

But the structural question is the only one that matters for returns. A summit that fills the ceremonial chairs and leaves the commercial chairs empty is a summit that preserves the status quo: American capital cannot freely buy Chinese technology assets, Chinese capital cannot freely buy American ones, and the AI labs on both sides raise money from whoever their governments allow. Price that accordingly.

The emptiness is the point. TikTok is the single largest US-China technology asset whose ownership is being forcibly restructured, and the two governments are describing different transactions. Investors pricing TikTok's American business are pricing an American asset. Investors pricing ByteDance are pricing a company whose crown jewel may not legally leave the country. Somebody's chair is imaginary.

We started East/West AIpha on a bet: the East-West AI race is the single best lens on where returns will come from, and nobody is covering it from inside both rooms. Eleven years, eight state-visit outcomes, and one refused model response later, the bet holds.

Here is the position, stated plainly. The empty chairs are a buying signal for diligence, not for exposure. When the builders are not in the room, the risk is not that AI progress stops. The risk is that capital gets allocated by communique instead of by competition. Our job is to stay in both rooms, especially the ones where the chairs are empty.

That is why we report what the models will not say. Kimi's refusal is data. The empty business delegation is data. The superintelligence/artificial intelligence translation gap is data. A newsletter that only covers the full chairs is a press release. We cover the empty ones.

The market chairs are the ones we watch most closely. When Chinese listings wobble on audit fears and TikTok's algorithm cannot legally cross the Pacific, the diversification premium on US AI assets rises. We are long the builders who showed up to dinner. We are cautious on the structures that depend on chairs staying filled by communique. East/West AIpha is currently in beta. When we exit beta, the subscription will be $49 per year (50% off the regular $99 price). This beta pricing is available to all subscribers who join during the beta period. This is edition 18. We will keep counting the chairs.

If this edition helped you see the empty chairs, forward it to one investor who still thinks summits are about the toasts. We grow by word of mouth, not by algorithm.

San Eng
Chairman, WorkOptional.ai
Author, The Ten Commandments of Investing (WSJ & USA Today bestseller)

DISCLOSURES

Nothing in this newsletter is investment advice. We write about the East-West AI race because it is the best lens on returns, not because we have a position in every company mentioned. When we do have a position, we will tell you.

Sources: SCMP reporting (August 19, September 12, September 14, September 20), Bloomberg (September 20), White House and Chinese foreign ministry statements on the September 2026 summit outcomes, Kimi K2 Think response recorded September 29, 2026.