ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE, May 15, 2026 — President Donald Trump acknowledged Friday that the United States conducts covert operations against China that Beijing has yet to detect, saying he delivered that message personally to Chinese President Xi Jinping during their closed-door summit in Beijing — a disclosure with few precedents in the history of American wartime diplomacy and intelligence posture.
“I told him, ‘We do a lot of stuff to you that you don’t know about,'” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as the delegation departed China following a two-day summit at the Great Hall of the People. The statement was not framed as a diplomatic slip. It was framed as a deliberate message — one commander to another.
The admission came after a reporter pressed Trump on Chinese cyberattacks against American critical infrastructure, including allegations that Beijing has embedded malicious code inside U.S. power grids, water utilities, and telecommunications networks. Rather than confronting Xi over those operations, Trump described the conversation as an exchange between two powers that both understand the covert battlefield they share. “We spy like hell on them too,” Trump said plainly.
What makes Trump’s remarks operationally significant is not just what he told reporters at 35,000 feet — it is what he claims to have said face-to-face with the leader of America’s foremost strategic adversary. U.S. presidents have historically avoided acknowledging offensive cyber operations even to domestic audiences. Trump appears to have made that acknowledgment directly to Xi Jinping as a form of deterrence, or at minimum, as leverage in a negotiation where both sides have covert reach inside each other’s most sensitive systems.
According to Trump’s own account, Xi did not absorb the framing without a response. When Trump raised Chinese cyberattacks during the summit, Xi pushed back by citing American operations against China. “He talked about attacks that we did in China,” Trump told reporters, describing an exchange that sounded less like a diplomatic confrontation than a mutual recognition between two nuclear-armed states taking stock of their operations against each other. That dynamic is consistent with what American defense officials have observed for years. In April 2025, Beijing publicly named three alleged NSA hackers for the first time, offering bounties for their capture. China’s Ministry of State Security separately accused the NSA of conducting a sustained hacking campaign against China’s National Time Service Center dating back to 2022.
The backdrop against which those Air Force One remarks landed is one of the most significant cyber conflict landscapes in American military history. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment highlights persistent cyber threats to U.S. government, private sector, and critical infrastructure networks posed by Chinese government-linked cyber actors, including Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, assessing that their tactics and target selection extend beyond traditional espionage into pre-positioning for potential disruption of critical infrastructure. U.S. agencies have confirmed that Volt Typhoon has compromised the IT environments of multiple critical infrastructure organizations — primarily in communications, energy, transportation systems, and water and wastewater systems — in the continental United States and its territories, including Guam, maintaining access in some victim environments for at least five years.
The military implications of that access are not abstract. Lt. Gen. Thomas Hensley, commander of 16th Air Force and Air Forces Cyber, warned that if the United States finds itself in a conflict with China and Beijing executes destructive cyberattacks against American critical infrastructure, “that is total war.” The concern, shared widely across the defense establishment, is that Volt Typhoon is not conducting espionage in the traditional sense — it is pre-positioning for a wartime first strike against the systems that keep American society functioning. Cybersecurity firm Dragos, which has helped multiple critical infrastructure organizations investigate compromises attributed to Volt Typhoon, reported that the group continued to attack U.S. utilities through 2025 and remains active, with its chief executive warning that there are compromised sites in the U.S. and NATO countries that “we will never find.”
Chinese officials have not always denied this. In a secret December 2024 meeting in Geneva between Chinese and American officials, China’s delegation made remarks that American delegates interpreted as a tacit acknowledgment of involvement in the Volt Typhoon campaign, linking the intrusions to U.S. support for Taiwan — the first time Chinese officials had made such an admission to their American counterparts. The conclusion drawn by U.S. officials after that meeting was that the intrusions were designed to deter American military intervention in a Taiwan contingency — not passive espionage, but coercive pre-positioning.
Trump’s claim that the United States is operating inside Chinese systems in ways Beijing has yet to discover fits within a documented, if rarely discussed, history of American offensive cyber operations. The NSA’s Tailored Access Operations unit has conducted operations against Chinese networks for decades. The 2018 U.S. cybersecurity strategy, implemented during Trump’s first term, explicitly authorized offensive cyber operations as a deterrent tool under a posture known as “defend forward” — disrupting adversary operations by operating inside foreign systems before threats reach American networks. The U.S. is also widely credited as a co-developer of Stuxnet, the first publicly documented malware engineered to cause physical destruction to industrial hardware, deployed against Iranian nuclear centrifuges and establishing the operational precedent for infrastructure-targeting cyberweapons that both Washington and Beijing have since expanded upon.
The Beijing summit produced no announced agreements on cybersecurity, and Trump’s Air Force One remarks left core military questions unanswered — what specific operations he disclosed to Xi, what Xi’s full response was, and whether the two leaders discussed any framework for limiting offensive cyber operations against each other’s infrastructure. What the summit did produce, according to CNN, was a cordial conclusion with few clear breakthroughs, though China’s foreign ministry described it as “historical.” Xi accepted Trump’s invitation to visit the White House in September. On Taiwan, Trump told reporters he made “no commitment either way,” while a pending $14 billion U.S. arms sale to the island remained unresolved. Xi warned during the summit that mishandling Taiwan could lead to “clashes and even conflicts.”
The espionage tension between the two sides was visible even on the ground in Beijing throughout the summit, with U.S. officials and journalists advised to travel with phones and laptops that could be wiped or destroyed, and with several incidents of U.S. officials and press corps members being physically blocked by Chinese security during the presidential visit. What is now resolved, at least on the record, is that Trump looked Xi Jinping in the eye and told him that American forces are operating inside Chinese systems in ways China has not yet discovered — and then confirmed it publicly, to reporters, departing Chinese airspace aboard Air Force One.