Dear President Trump, here’s a deal you can actually make that will make you look great

Gary Marcus published an open letter addressed to President Trump on September 23, 2026, ahead of a planned meeting between Trump and President Xi focused on AI. Marcus wrote that expectations for the meeting are low and that Trump could surprise observers.

Marcus said he had argued the previous week in The Economist that the meeting is a chance for Trump to win a Nobel Prize, and he wrote that Sam Altman thinks the same. He noted that most people are focused on a deal around a slowdown, which he said he happens to think might be a good idea, especially if made now while the US is still ahead, adding that this could lock in the lead. He cautioned that without a slowdown, "really bad things might happen," and Trump would take much of the blame.

Instead of a slowdown, Marcus proposed collaboration, comparing it to US cooperation with the Soviet Union during the Cold War on space and smallpox, but this time around cancer and cybersecurity. He wrote that many people would say China would never want to collaborate, but that this is not true, and that China is practically begging to collaborate.

Marcus cited The Guardian, writing that the front page of the Tuesday edition of the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese communist party, ran an article saying the US and China should "make AI a new frontier for China-US cooperation" and "make good use of the intergovernmental dialogue mechanism on AI." He urged Trump to take up that call and said he gave two specific examples in The Economist. Marcus signed the letter as Professor Emeritus, NYU, and CEO and Founder of Geometric Intelligence, which he noted was acquired by Uber.