Trump officials considering AI executive meeting on the sidelines of Xi visit next week
By Alayna Treene, Hadas Gold, CNN
(CNN) — Executives of major technology and artificial intelligence companies are expected to travel to Washington, DC, next week for Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s state visit to the White House — and some Trump officials are contemplating a meeting with them on the sidelines of the high-stakes summit, sources familiar with the plans tell CNN.
Administration officials are privately discussing possible logistics for a meeting with the executives about the future of AI and the risks that accompany it, the sources said, though nothing has been finalized or scheduled. It was not immediately clear if President Donald Trump would participate if the meeting materializes, the sources said. Xi is not currently expected to be included.
“The Administration is in regular contact with AI frontier labs, and will continue engaging with the tech industry to cement America’s AI dominance while keeping Americans safe,” a Trump administration official told CNN.
Representatives for Meta, Anthropic, Google and SpaceXAI did not respond to requests for comment.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are among those expected to attend Trump’s state dinner for Xi and could possibly attend such a meeting, the sources told CNN. OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane confirmed Altman would attend the dinner in an interview on CBS on Wednesday morning.
The efforts to arrange a meeting come as AI leaders — including Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk — have expressed concerns publicly about the dangers the technology poses if it continues to go unchecked, only to see Trump dismiss them, in part over fears that slowing AI growth could benefit China.
“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” Trump posted on social media Monday, one in a series of aggressive messages that argued that the calls for more guardrails are part of a “SICK conspiracy.”
Holding a meeting around the summit with Xi — even if the Chinese leader didn’t participate directly — could provide for an awkward setting, given Trump’s and other top Republicans’ focus on edging ahead of Beijing.
But there are hopes among some lawmakers that such a meeting could be the starting point for some sort of agreement between the two countries on AI development to prevent an arms race. Altman told Fortune Magazine last week that he thinks Trump and Xi would get the Nobel Peace Prize together if they could come to some sort of agreement on AI development.
“Even if just the US and China could agree on some shared standards and testing for development of this technology, I think that’d be a wonderful accomplishment that the two of them can deliver,” Altman said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had previously said a meeting with AI executives and Trump was in the works, but he told CNN on Tuesday that timing of the meeting near Xi’s visit would be a coincidence.
“We’ve been talking about this for quite some time and all the discussion from the weekend and the first couple days this week prompted us to go ahead and schedule it,” he said.
The speaker declined to say whether the meeting had been scheduled, but told reporters, “I think it’s next week.”
Trump has also spoken about the issue with Nvidia’s Huang, who has been publicly skeptical about AI doomsday predictions.
On Monday, Trump phoned up Huang while he was speaking at a summit in Los Angeles. Huang then put the president on speakerphone for the crowd, with Trump telling the audience he was genetically predisposed to understand the issue because his uncle taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I also have common sense about AI,” Trump added. “The robots will not be taking over. The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax.”
The-CNN-Wire
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CNN’s Ellis Kim and Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
