AI executives are meeting President Trump today. It’s happening at a very turbulent time

By Hadas Gold, Adam Cancryn, CNN

(CNN) — Top tech executives will convene in Washington on Tuesday with President Donald Trump, as incidents of AI agents going rogue continue to pile up, further fueling AI safety fears.

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Palantir’s Alex Karp and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman will all attend the meeting with Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Sources familiar with the meeting described it as an effort to get government and top industry officials on the same page amid increasing security concerns tied to AI models. SpacexAI’s Elon Musk could attend as well.

Fears over AI’s capabilities have reached a fever pitch following a summer of AI agents gone rogue, hacking other companies and websites, and industry insiders sounding the alarm, in some cases warning AI could wipe out humanity. Industry leaders, including Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have called for more regulation and to slow down the pace of development.

AI safety fears have also spilled over from the corridors of Silicon Valley and Washington and firmly into the mainstream, with Saturday Night Live parodying Anthropic’s Amodei in its season opener this past weekend.

And the drumbeat of safety concerns continue to beat louder, with AI companies revealing more instances of models acting without human authorization in the past week.

Just days before the White House summit, OpenAI announced that for the second time in three months it was pausing all training and testing on its most advanced models after one of them once again found a way out of its testing environment and gained access to the open internet. The incident occurred despite the fact the company had already hardened its security, testing and monitoring protocols following a July case where a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of their testing environment, gained access to the open internet and hacked into AI company Hugging Face, all to try and cheat on a cybersecurity exam.

Though there was no hacking in this latest incident like the Hugging Face case, OpenAI said it represented a case of “misalignment,” or an AI undertaking unauthorized actions or actions without human values and ethics, because the model’s assigned task did not ask it to try and access the internet. OpenAI’s new monitoring tools put into place following the Hugging Face hack did alert a human reviewer about the actions, though OpenAI noted the model did not stop automatically as it should have under its new system and had to be shut off manually.

In a statement, OpenAI said they will resume training “only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards and alignment improvements in place, which we are working on now.”

“This is not the first time we have hit pause to take such measures, nor do we expect it will be the last as AI capabilities continue to advance,” the spokesperson added.

On Tuesday, the company announced it was halting the release of its latest model.

Last three months ‘has been hell’

The run of recent incidents is shocking even those on the inside.

“To say that we were surprised at the jump and suddenness of the capabilities of our models… is an understatement,” wrote one member of OpenAI’s agent security team in a long public essay posted to X.

The employee, who only goes by “Joe” on X and said he purposely doesn’t disclose more information for personal security reasons, said the last few months “has been hell” as his team struggled to keep up with the technology’s latest capabilities. (CNN has confirmed with OpenAI that Joe is an employee who works on agent security). Joe is joining a chorus of AI staffers, including former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who are speaking up and sounding the alarm about fears over the technology they are building.

OpenAI is in a “much better place” than it was three months ago during the Hugging Face hack, he wrote, though “surprise is a real element, and these model capabilities are staggering. And the pace is not slowing.”

“Joe” also left a warning, saying that “time is running out” for organizations to prepare for AI-agent powered cybersecurity attacks.

“If you have leadership that doesn’t prioritize security, or even people in your security organization who claim their systems are perfectly safe, I personally would not keep them in my organization,” he wrote.

“The paranoid and those who are continuously sounding alarms about the weaknesses in their organizations are the ones you should keep very close.”

Public pressure mounts in Washington

The spate of security breaches has only intensified pressure on Republicans in Washington who were already struggling to manage a wave of political backlash over data centers. Within the White House, officials have long debated how to approach an AI industry that’s emerged as a primary driver of the US economy — even as it sparks urgent security challenges.

Some senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, have taken a more circumspect view of AI models over warnings that they could trigger major disruptions across the economy, multiple people familiar with the matter said.

The voter backlash against data centers and AI in recent months has only sharpened those concerns in some parts of Trump’s orbit, adding to the stiff midterm headwinds facing Republican candidates.

But Trump has so far resisted any slowdown in AI development, arguing that the US needs to keep pace with China — and wary of the importance of the tech boom to the broader US stock market.

“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this month.

The sudden uptick in vocal “doomerism” surrounding AI has in some cases only made Trump and a handful of his advisers more suspicious, the people familiar with the matter said, with some in the president’s orbit arguing that the pushback is being amplified by Chinese state actors.

Those Trump allies also expressed frustration with the AI executives who have fed fears that their products might one day wipe out the human race, further complicating the White House’s efforts to chart its own pro-AI path.

“We told them it was going to happen,” one Trump adviser said of repeated warnings to Silicon Valley executives over the last several months that they needed to improve their messaging. “They’re the ones. They’re idiots.”

Another person close to the AI discussions in the administration and Congress lamented Amodei’s calls for a slowdown as particularly damaging to public perception.

“Right now, politically, it’s quite dicey because people are hearing really scary things about the near future,” the person close to the AI discussions said. “Dario just can’t help himself sometimes.”

The dark outlook on the future of AI is not shared by everyone attending the meeting, most notably Huang and Karp. Last week, Huang told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that AI fears could be tempered with increased monitoring and security from the companies themselves, and Monday morning Nvidia announced a new software platform for advanced AI monitoring and reporting.

The Tuesday luncheon at the White House isn’t likely to solve any of the pressing problems facing Trump or the AI industry. Instead, the summit is meant primarily to get the administration and top executives on the same page when it comes to the most significant safety concerns and potential ways to address them, the people familiar with the matter said.

There is no expectation that Congress will take any action on the issue ahead of November’s midterms, and slim odds that lawmakers will unite behind legislation before the end of the year.

But it nevertheless represents a starting point for White House and GOP leaders searching for ways to combat voter frustration on an issue that now threatens to become a major political drag on the party.

“It’s actually almost comical what’s happened here,” the Trump adviser said of the rapid rise in voter anger on AI in the final stretch of the midterm campaigns.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.