Beijing's foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian framed it as evidence of Washington's “overstretching of national security” and “malicious blocking and suppression.” By Friday, the US side was indicating none of that had made it into the agenda.

What did make it in, in some form, was a partial commercial concession. Reuters reported separately that Washington cleared sales of Nvidia's H200 AI chips to several major Chinese technology firms shortly after Trump met Xi on Thursday, an administrative move that the export-review regime had been technically capable of since January, when the Trump administration shifted H200 and AMD MI325X reviews from presumption of denial to case-by-case evaluation.

Greer told Bloomberg that allowing the H200 imports would be a “sovereign decision” for China, a phrasing that puts the political onus for any further purchases on Beijing.

The Greer framing matters because it splits the executive branch from Congress on chip policy. The MATCH Act, advancing through the House under the lead sponsorship of Representative Michael Baumgartner, would tighten the equipment-export rules that Greer's office is now signalling it is not pressing aggressively at the bilateral level.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has spent the spring brokering Mythos and other AI-system access deals with allies in Tokyo and London. The legislative branch is pushing in the opposite direction from the trade-and-Treasury track, on largely the same product set.

Jensen Huang's presence on Trump's Beijing delegation reads as confirmation of the same split. Huang was added to the delegation late after initially being excluded, joining the trip in Alaska after a direct call from Trump.

The H200 clearances within days of the summit are unlikely to have happened without his line of argument inside the room, which has been consistent: cede the Chinese AI stack to Huawei now and the US loses its software-ecosystem advantage permanently.

Greer's interview also flagged narrower deliverables. He told Bloomberg there had been “progress” on Chinese purchases of American agricultural goods, although he was cautious on tariff certainty.

On the security side, he emphasised that keeping the Strait of Hormuz open is “crucial for China,” reading the war in Iran into the trade conversation in a way that ties Beijing's interest in a settlement to its own crude-supply exposure.

What the de-emphasis on chip controls does not signal is a Washington retreat. The MATCH Act is still in motion. Order No. 834, China's April supply-chain security regulation, is also on the books and authorises retaliatory action through 15-plus agencies.

The administration's January easing of H200 review was always meant to be calibrated, not structural, and the Nvidia clearances this week are calibrated rather than scale-defining.

What the Greer comments do signal is that the politically charged version of the conversation, the one Beijing was preparing to have, did not happen at the summit. That conversation is moving instead between Congress, the Treasury, and the licensing desks at the Commerce Department.

The administration's next visible chip-policy step is the House floor consideration of the MATCH Act, on a schedule yet to be set. Beijing's response, on Greer's reading, will not be coordinated through the summit channel.