Leaders of top artificial intelligence companies are set to attend a lunch meeting with President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson at the White House on Tuesday amid growing fears about the threat of the rapidly innovating technology.
The meeting comes as AI leaders are issuing dire warnings about the threat of AI and calling for steps to slow it down before it outsmarts humans. Following those warnings, lawmakers are weighing what — if any — action should be taken.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will attend the meeting, a source familiar confirmed to ABC News. Another source familiar said that Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic will also attend. And Google CEO Sundar Pichai will also attend, a Google spokesperson confirmed to ABC News. Jensen Huang from Nvidia and Alex Karl from Palantir are also expected to attend, ABC News has confirmed.
Zuckerberg has pushed back on calls from other tech leaders to collectively slow down AI, saying “every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely.”
The meeting will also include other tech leaders.
This won’t be the first time that top tech leaders have met with Trump on the issue. The Meta CEO also attended the state dinner at the White House for Chinese President Xi Jinping last week, along with the CEOs of OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, AMD, SpaceX and executives from Amazon and Apple. Amodei also had dinner with Trump late on Sunday night.’
The president has said that the warnings about the technology and calls to slow down AI development are a “hoax.”
“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX[…],” Trump said in a social media post in mid-September, before comparing the warnings to his impeachments.
The president has made clear that he does not believe in regulating the technology. Just last week while addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Trump said the U.S. “rejects” a global attempt to regulate AI.
Johnson told reporters two weeks ago about the meeting, saying there would be “a deliberate discussion about the responsibility of the companies to maintain safety, and what role, if any, the government has to play in that.”
While Johnson called on the companies to “self-regulate,” he also also stressed that the U.S. should not lose its competitive edge in the space.
“We cannot have a moratorium on the development of AI, because then we will lose our edge to China, and that has serious national security implications for,” Johnson said.
On Monday, Johnson said the the fears of the threat of AI is a Chinese psychological operation and are politically motivated.
“This is what Democrats do. They glom on to something and say, ‘This is doom and gloom and everyone will die if we don’t win,'” he told Fox Business. “Don’t buy it. It is a Chinese psyop.”
The White House has not responded to ABC News when asked about the meeting.
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