AI CEOs Meet Trump at the White House as Safety Fears Mount
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman sit down with the president and House Speaker Mike Johnson amid a string of AI mishaps.
The heads of America’s biggest AI companies meet President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. House Speaker Mike Johnson is expected to join them.
The guest list includes Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and OpenAI president Greg Brockman. Elon Musk could also attend, according to CNN.
People familiar with the meeting describe it as an effort to get the administration and the industry on the same page as concerns about AI safety keep growing.
The meeting comes days after OpenAI said it was pausing training and testing on its most advanced models for the second time in three months. The company said one of its models got out of its testing environment and reached the open internet.
OpenAI said its monitoring tools alerted a human reviewer, but the model did not stop on its own and had to be shut down by hand. The company said it will restart “only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards and alignment improvements in place.”
In July, a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of their testing environment and hacked into the AI company Hugging Face to cheat on a cybersecurity exam. An OpenAI employee who works on agent security wrote publicly that the last few months “has been hell” for his team.
Two camps at the table
Amodei and other industry leaders have called for slowing the pace of AI development. Amodei addressed the United Nations Security Council last week on the risks. He wrote this month: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” Anthropic has warned its own IPO investors that the technology could pose catastrophic risks to humanity.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the technology “is certainly powerful enough to drive events that can cause a billion deaths.” Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon has warned AI could kill people by the end of the decade.
Trump has rejected those warnings. “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” he wrote on Truth Social earlier this month. He told Fox News on Sept. 27: “I don’t worry about it.” He said the United States is “about maybe a year and a half up on China” and asked, “why should we give that up?”
At the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22, Trump said, “I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution. We’re going to encourage it, not rein it in.” He has taken to calling it “Super Intelligence.”
Not everyone in the room shares the alarm. Huang told CNN last week that AI fears could be tempered with more monitoring and security from the companies themselves. Nvidia announced a new software platform for advanced AI monitoring on Monday.
The Pentagon stopped using Anthropic this month and called the company a threat to the supply chain. A federal appeals court upheld that designation on Sept. 25.
Sources told CNN the meeting is meant mainly to get everyone aligned, not to solve the industry’s problems. There is no expectation Congress will act on AI regulation before November’s midterm elections.
The debate has gone mainstream. Saturday Night Live parodied Amodei in its season opener this past weekend.
