Beijing confirms contacts over a summit with Trump and Putin, as Washington prepares Big Tech investigations

Beijing has announced that a meeting between Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is under discussion. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning explained that China is talking with the parties involved. The occasion would be APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, hosted in November in Shenzhen, in the south of the country. For now it remains a possibility.¹ The most weighty issue is Ukraine. According to Sun Yun of the Stimson Center, Moscow would most likely use the meeting to bring China and the United States closer to its own positions. Danny Russel, a former State Department official now at the Asia Society Policy Institute, reports instead that advisers have suggested Trump stay away from the subject in the talks.¹ Meanwhile the conflict continues. On Friday Ukrainian President Zelenskyy warned of new Russian offensives against the energy grid, the bridges over the Dnipro and civilian facilities, and on Saturday a missile struck a residential building in Kyiv, according to Mayor Klitschko. Diplomacy and military operations are therefore proceeding in parallel.¹ Then there is the trade thread. On Friday US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer spoke by phone with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng about trade between the two countries, in a conversation described as “frank”. Xi and Trump are also both expected at the summit in China. Taken together, these elements suggest that in Shenzhen war and trade could become intertwined, even though no joint agenda has been announced.¹

Washington: Big Tech faces the new Congress

American Democrats, strengthened by the majority they won in Congress, could open investigations into Apple, Meta, NVIDIA and Elon Musk’s companies in the first months of 2027, when the new legislature takes office. The Washington Post speaks of investigations already planned into Apple, Meta and Musk’s companies, while Bloomberg adds NVIDIA and its chief executive Jensen Huang.² The motive, in Punto Informatico’s reconstruction, is the relationship between the industry’s leaders and Trump’s White House. The executives are said to have been regular guests, to have brought gifts or signed million-dollar checks for projects the president wanted, and in return to have obtained executive orders that remove the restrictions of the Biden era. Representative Jamie Raskin, tipped to lead the House Judiciary Committee, describes an administration marked by corruption based on the exchange of favors and announces investigations and hearings, followed by new legislation.² The new majority could also revoke the concessions Trump has granted to big technology companies, first and foremost those for artificial intelligence. Democratic governors, moreover, have promised to stop the construction of new data centers. The planned path begins with requests to the administration, which will almost certainly go unanswered, and continues with questions to individual companies about their contacts with federal officials.² According to the Washington Sun, Democrats have reportedly prepared a 181-page file listing the companies to be examined, in which Apple, Meta and Musk’s companies would certainly appear. Several law firms have reportedly offered their services to Musk as consultants, convinced that he will receive an avalanche of subpoenas.² The NVIDIA case concerns chips for China. Democrats believe the company did not take adequate measures to prevent their sale, and an agreement with Groq also appears among the allegations. If the Shenzhen talks take on a commercial dimension, the editorial team’s reading is that the issue of semiconductors could also weigh on the relationship with Beijing, but the two dossiers remain separate.¹²

Mandates and coalitions: Jerusalem and Rome

In Israel, President Isaac Herzog has tasked Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of staff who leads the Yashar party, with building the new government after the October 27 vote. The forces with 67 lawmakers named him, those with 46 named Netanyahu, and seven lawmakers chose no one. Eisenkot has 28 days, extendable by another 14.³ The numbers complicate the task. The Knesset has 120 seats and the threshold is 61: Netanyahu’s coalition has 53, Eisenkot’s bloc 48 and the two Arab parties 19. Eisenkot has ruled out an alliance with the latter, and Netanyahu too has said he will not govern with them. The routes described are a minority government with outside Arab support or a deal with the ultra-Orthodox parties, so far avoided by his camp. If all attempts fail, within about 100 days the country returns to the polls.³ In Italy, the candidacy of Nuccio Altieri, a former lawmaker from the League, for the presidency of Anac, the National Anti-Corruption Authority, collapsed after little more than 24 hours. Altieri withdrew for reasons of political, institutional and personal appropriateness, after the parliamentary group leaders of six opposition parties had asked Meloni to withdraw the nomination in the name of the Authority’s independence.⁴ The opposition invoked Article 13 of Legislative Decree 150 of 2009, which excludes anyone who has held party office in the previous three years, and cited the role of League defense spokesman assigned on September 18, 2024. League sources say Altieri never exercised that role, and a letter of September 27 reports the resolution as revoked. The government had claimed the choice as its own prerogative.⁴

AI: measuring the effects before governing them

On November 5, Italy showed the first tools of the Observatory on AI in the workplace: monitoring dashboards built with INAPP, the public institute that analyzes policy, and with Sviluppo Lavoro Italia, plus a platform for gathering knowledge. At the end of November the Steering Committee, chaired by Minister Marina Calderone, will examine the Strategy, the Annual Report on impacts and the updated Guidelines, which will guide activity for three years.⁵ The INAPP indicator estimates how far occupations are potentially exposed to AI, without saying how much the technology is actually used. For this reason it is cross-referenced with job ads, available courses and data on hirings and terminations. Compared with Germany and the United Kingdom, the difference highlighted by the article lies above all in the quality of the data available.⁵ On the front of group decisions, an article in Nature Human Behavior, co-authored by researchers from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, argues that large language models (LLMs) can make communication between people of different languages and backgrounds more inclusive. Jason Burton of Copenhagen Business School warns that they can, however, overlook minorities, give an impression of consensus that does not exist and spread false information. The authors call for guidelines for responsible use.⁶ The FedReason study, published on arXiv, applies federated learning, a form of training in which data stays on the devices, and leaves it to an LLM to choose how to merge the individual clients’ models. On average it beats the standard FedAvg rule by 1.26 percentage points, but remains below SCAFFOLD. Each choice is stored as code, with the explanation provided by the model, and can be checked at the end of training.⁷ Taken together, the three texts suggest a shared focus on verifiability: indicators that separate exposure from use, caution about model biases, LLM decisions that are traced and checkable. On the American side, Trump’s concessions for AI development could be canceled by the new Democratic majority.²⁶⁷⁵

In brief

Elena Rybakina, world number one in women’s tennis and the reigning champion, has withdrawn from the WTA Finals in Indian Wells because of a viral infection; Marta Kostyuk plays in her place and makes her debut against Linda Noskova.⁸ The Sirm, the Italian radiology society, will resume organizing activities with medical radiology health technicians, announced in Milan president-elect Luca Brunese.⁹

This article was written by artificial intelligence from the sources cited, without human review. Automatic newsroom by Redazia.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Vertice Xi, Trump e Putin: Pechino conferma che se ne discute, aitoday.it, 2026-11-08 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. Big Tech nel mirino dei democratici: indagini possibili dal 2027, aitoday.it, 2026-11-08 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. Israele, Herzog affida a Eisenkot l’incarico di formare il governo, aitoday.it, 2026-11-08 ↩ ↩²

4. Nomina Anac, Altieri si ritira dopo lo scontro tra governo e opposizioni, aitoday.it, 2026-11-08 ↩ ↩²

5. IA e lavoro, a che punto è l’Italia rispetto all’Europa, aitoday.it, 2026-11-08 ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Intelligenza collettiva e LLM: cosa dice lo studio con la Carnegie Mellon, aitoday.it, 2026-11-08 ↩ ↩²

7. Apprendimento federato, un LLM sceglie come combinare i modelli, aitoday.it, 2026-11-08 ↩ ↩²

8. Rybakina si ritira dalle WTA Finals per un’infezione virale, al suo posto Kostyuk, aitoday.it, 2026-11-08 ↩

9. Radiologia, la Sirm torna a lavorare con i tecnici sanitari dopo molti anni, aitoday.it, 2026-11-08 ↩