WASHINGTON — As he brushes aside artificial intelligence doomsday warnings as a “hoax,” President Donald Trump on Tuesday will host nearly 20 tech titans at a White House lunch to discuss the rapidly advancing technology.
The group includes a who’s who of the tech world, including CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, according to a White House official.
Trump is hosting the lunch with Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. Vice President JD Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles also will be on hand.
Earlier Tuesday, Trump unveiled America.gov, a website that features an AI-powered tool meant to serve as a “one-stop shop” for Americans navigating government services.
In recent weeks, tech executives on the AI frontier, including Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have sounded the alarm about the potential dangers of AI, calling for greater government oversight and global cooperation in regulating the technology.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, pictured at Trump’s state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week, will attend Tuesday’s AI lunch.Annabelle Gordon / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Trump has dismissed the existential warnings, arguing that American tech companies need to continue to innovate and keep their foot on the gas to stay ahead of China in the AI arms race.
Trump isn’t expected to deviate from that AI messaging, even as the dire warnings about humans’ potentially losing control over self-improving AI systems — known as recursive self-improvement, or RSI — grow louder and more frequent.
“Whoever wins AI … whoever wins “SI,” whoever wins super intelligence, wins. That’s the group that wins, and we’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way,” Trump said in his address last week to the United Nations General Assembly.
Trump has said he worries regulation may “stifle growth” in AI.Aaron Schwartz / Bloomberg via Getty Images
“I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution — many say bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself — and we will be very careful,” he said.
Johnson, a close Trump ally, began pushing for an AI summit with some of the biggest names in tech shortly after whistleblower Jacob Coxon made international headlines by resigning from Claude maker Anthropic. Coxon warned that the people building those systems believe they could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Johnson has made it clear he doesn’t believe Washington should take a heavy-handed approach to regulating AI, arguing that existing laws and regulations can be applied to AI companies and suggesting that they should be held legally liable if their products caused harm.
In an appearance Monday on Fox Business, Johnson praised Trump for convening the AI leaders in one room.
“They have a corporate responsibility, as every corporation does, to create safe products, right? And there’s product liabilities laws that apply and a labyrinth of federal regulations on all this stuff already. We do not need a moratorium,” he said.
While lawmakers have introduced dozens of AI-related bills in recent years, the GOP-controlled Congress is showing no urgency to act on the issue. House members aren’t expected back in Washington until after the Nov. 3 midterm elections, and senators could leave town as soon as this week.
“We do not need to jump in and hyperregulate this, because we’ll lose the race to China,” Johnson said on Fox Business. “The innovation is important to continue, but we have to strike the right balance.”
In recent weeks, tech executives on the AI frontier, including Amodei, pictured, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have sounded the alarm about the potential dangers of AI.Jason Henry / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said he won’t attend the AI lunch, but he privately met with Amodei in the Capitol on Monday evening.
“I hope it’s productive,” Thune said of Tuesday’s summit.
Before the White House lunch, Trump gathered with Vance, Cabinet members and a handful of tech leaders a few blocks away at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium to unveil America.gov, an AI-powered web portal and chatbot designed to improve Americans’ experiences accessing federal resources.
A White House official called the tool “a new front door for the federal government that will provide a one-stop shop for Americans looking for information and resources from the federal government that are currently spread over a maze of various agency websites.”
The National Design Studio, the year-old agency launched by Trump and led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, helped create the project. Trump was introduced by self-help author and motivational speaker Tony Robbins.
“We’re launching today something that is really — it’s not just simply a website; it’s a restoration of America’s founding promise, and it’s a reinvention of your government for the 21st century and beyond,” Trump said.
“Instead of forcing citizens to search through the endless maze of tens of thousands of terrible government websites and rules … you’ll now have one front door for every single question,” Trump said. “Everything will be answered easily and quickly, a digital home built around your time and your life.”
Trump likened the site to chatbots like Grok, Gemini and ChatGPT and a White House official told NBC News that America.gov is using Gemini and Grok.
Trump also suggested he would “end” America.gov if it was ever hacked.
It “cannot, in theory, be hacked into. And when they figure a way to do that, we’ll end it, okay?” Trump said. “Because they always figure a way, right?”
In addition to Trump and Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz were on hand.
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown and Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp were also expected to attend, according to the White House.