US and Chinese leaders have prioritized maintaining competitive leads in frontier large language models over any mutual slowdown, with President Trump explicitly rejecting capability-pacing calls as a “hoax” that would benefit Beijing and Chinese officials dismissing similar proposals as fearmongering. The September 2026 Trump-Xi summit produced only an incidents hotline and scheduled November dialogue focused on risk communication, not binding restraints on model releases or training compute. Chinese developers have meanwhile narrowed benchmark gaps to roughly 3 percent via rapid releases such as DeepSeek V4.1, reinforcing incentives on both sides to accelerate rather than pause progress. While a major AI incident or breakthrough alignment failure could reopen talks, current policy signals and domestic priorities make a 2026 pacing agreement highly improbable.