Trump to host summit with top AI leaders in Washington

WASHINGTON — As he brushes aside artificial intelligence doomsday warnings as a “hoax,” President Donald Trump will host tech leaders for lunch Tuesday to discuss the rapidly advancing technology.

Also Tuesday, Trump will unveil America.gov, a website that will feature an AI-powered tool meant to help Americans navigate government services.

In recent weeks, tech executives on the AI frontier, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, have sounded the alarm about the potential dangers of AI, calling for greater government oversight and global cooperation in regulating the technology.

Amodei will attend the lunch with Trump on Tuesday, as will Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, said company and White House sources who weren’t authorized to speak publicly. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., will also be there.

Trump has dismissed the existential warnings, arguing that American tech companies need to continue to innovate and keep their foot on the gas to stay ahead of China in the AI arms race.

Trump isn’t expected to deviate from that AI messaging, even as the dire warnings about humans’ potentially losing control over self-improving AI systems — known as recursive self-improvement, or RSI — grow louder and more frequent.

“Whoever wins AI ... whoever wins SI, whoever wins super intelligence, wins. That’s the group that wins, and we’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way,” Trump said in his address last week to the United Nations General Assembly.

“I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution — many say bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself — and we will be very careful,” he said.

Johnson, a close Trump ally, began pushing for an AI summit with some of the biggest names in tech shortly after whistleblower Jacob Coxon made international headlines by resigning from Claude maker Anthropic. Coxon warned that the people building those systems believe they could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Johnson has made it clear he doesn’t believe Washington should take a heavy-handed approach to regulating AI, arguing that existing laws and regulations can be applied to AI companies and suggesting that they should be held legally liable if their products caused harm.

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In an appearance Monday on Fox Business, Johnson praised Trump for convening the AI leaders in one room.

“They have a corporate responsibility, as every corporation does, to create safe products, right? And there’s product liabilities laws that apply and a labyrinth of federal regulations on all this stuff already. We do not need a moratorium,” he said.

While lawmakers have introduced dozens of AI-related bills in recent years, the GOP-controlled Congress is showing no urgency to act on the issue. House members aren’t expected back in Washington until after the Nov. 3 midterm elections, and senators could leave town as soon as this week.

“We do not need to jump in and hyperregulate this, because we’ll lose the race to China,” Johnson said on Fox Business. “The innovation is important to continue, but we have to strike the right balance.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said he won’t attend the AI lunch, but he privately met with Amodei in the Capitol on Monday evening.

“I hope it’s productive,” Thune said of Tuesday’s summit.

Before the White House lunch, Trump will gather with Vice President JD Vance, Cabinet members and a handful of tech leaders a few blocks away at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium to unveil America.gov, an AI-powered web portal designed to improve Americans’ experiences accessing federal resources.

A White House official called the tool “a new front door for the federal government that will provide a one-stop shop for Americans looking for information and resources from the federal government that are currently spread over a maze of various agency websites.”

The National Design Studio, the year-old agency launched by Trump and led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, helped create the project.

In addition to Trump and Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz will be on hand.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown and Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp also are expected to attend, according to the White House.