President Donald Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping at a White House state dinner Thursday, joined by the Masters of the AI Universe. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei was notably missing from the guest list that features Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk amongst others.
CNBC reports that seated with the two presidential couples were Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and his wife Lori Huang, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, AMD CEO Lisa Su and Apple CEO Tim Cook. Also on the list: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Google cofounder Sergey Brin and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rounded out the list of tech elites that attended.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was notably absent from the dinner. President Donald Trump has forcefully pushed back on Amodei’s “doomer” call for an AI slowdown, leading to Anthropic not having a seat at the table.
AI had already dominated the Trump-Xi meeting earlier that day. Trump previewed it that morning in a Truth Social post, writing, “Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is. That is China’s position also.” Trump has renamed AI “Super Intelligence,” or SI.
No U.S. government readout had been released as of publication, so a Chinese government account offered the fullest picture of what the two leaders actually said. According to that account, Xi told Trump the two countries “may have competition, but they may cooperate even more.” Xi added: “The two sides can continue their dialogue on AI, exchange views on its risks and benefits, and jointly prevent the misuse and abuse of AI.” He also said AI “must be kept under human control,” arguing that “a people-centered approach should be upheld, and AI should be developed for the positive and for good, so that AI will serve the progress of humanity.” The same Chinese readout quoted Trump as agreeing to “maintain dialogue and strengthen cooperation on AI.”
That exchange followed a weekend conversation between U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his Chinese counterpart He Lifeng, who discussed what was described as a “U.S.-China AI dialogue.” That arrangement reportedly includes a communication channel for incidents rising “up to a national security level,” a setup compared to the Cold War-era U.S.-Russia “red phone.”
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation, with China adding further complexity to the issue. David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws — a conflict that President Donald Trump recognizes. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.