President Trump gathered top artificial intelligence leaders in Washington on Tuesday and doubled down on his opposition to government intervention, suggesting that “self-regulation” may be the answer to growing worries about the technology getting out of human control.
“There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation,” the president said of the takeaways from the meeting with the assembled CEOs. “There was a lot of commonality in this room.”
The remarks came at the end of what the White House billed as a “meeting and luncheon on Super Intelligence” — reflecting Trump’s preferred name for the technology — in the East Room, with Trump even posting the seating chart.
The location was the same spot where, just a few days ago, many of these same AI leaders had gathered for a state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Elon Musk of Tesla (TSLA), Jensen Huang of Nvidia (NVDA), and Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) were all at the head table with Xi last Thursday and once again received prominent spots near Trump, according to the seating chart.
Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) CEO Dario Amodei, whose essay earlier this month titled “We Must Pace the Frontier” set off a debate about the need for a cooperative slowdown in AI capability, was in attendance after a series of meetings in Washington.
Other notable guests included Google (GOOGL, GOOG) CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) president Greg Brockman, Palantir (PLTR) CEO Alex Karp, Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, and others.
The gathering came as the US continues to digest a raft of alarming new AI disclosures in recent days, such as an Axios report that OpenAI, Anthropic, and security researchers were sifting through thousands of incidents of problematic actions by AI agents.
And in Florida, the attorney general unveiled a new state-level challenge asking a court to halt OpenAI’s training of new models unless it puts outside safeguards in place.
But that skepticism didn’t change the tenor of the gathering in Washington.
Trump on Tuesday repeatedly brushed off worries about the technology, saying after the meeting that he believes AI would make the world a safer place and that fears about data centers driving up costs were overblown.
He said instead that these new facilities “are going to make communities very happy.”
At an event earlier in the day to launch a new government website powered by AI, Trump promised that AI is “going to mostly be put to great use and we’ll stop the bad use.”