Trump to meet AI chiefs over safety outcry

AI bosses including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg will meet Donald Trump on Tuesday to discuss the risks posed by the technology, as the White House continues to defy calls for stricter regulation.

The lunch at the White House, which will include top executives from OpenAI, Google, Nvidia and Palantir as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson, comes after Amodei and other AI leaders pushed for an industry-wide agreement to slow the development of frontier models.

Their proposal has been met with opposition from the president, who claimed safety concerns were a “hoax” and a “sick conspiracy”, and that a deceleration in AI development would ultimately benefit China.

Trump has vowed that his administration would “not in any way hinder or stifle the growth of this incredible industry” and rejected calls for global guardrails.

His resistance to a regulatory regime has put him at odds with members of his Maga coalition. The president’s former strategist Steve Bannon this month called for a slowdown on AI development, while Republican candidates in tight midterm races have broken with Trump in advocating for new laws and restrictions on building AI data centres.

Ahead of the planned meeting, Trump ally Johnson said the purpose of the discussion would be to “strike the right balance” on AI safety.

AI companies “have a corporate responsibility, as every corporation does, to create safe products”, he told Fox Business. “We do not need to jump in and hyper-regulate this because we’ll lose the race to China.”

In a rare show of unity, Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceX’s Elon Musk this month called for a slowdown in AI research and increased co-ordination between labs and governments.

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Amodei, who has been leading the charge for more stringent oversight of AI, had previously been derided by Trump as one of the “leftwing nut jobs” leading Anthropic. His company was also designated a national security risk by the Pentagon after it refused to allow unrestricted use of its technology in warfare.

But in a sign of rapprochement, the two dined at the White House late on Sunday, with Trump calling Amodei “very highly respected”.

Tuesday’s meeting will also include OpenAI co-founder and Trump donor Greg Brockman, Google chief Sundar Pichai, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Palantir’s Alex Karp, according to people familiar with the matter.

Tech bosses including Musk are also set to attend a separate event on Tuesday at which the president will unveil America.gov, a new website for access to government services.

Additional reporting by Stephen Morris in San Francisco