Thune to skip White House AI meeting with Trump, Johnson, and tech CEOs

The tech CEOs expected to be in attendance include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who had a private dinner with Trump at the White House on Sunday after having a scheduling conflict during last week’s state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping, which was also attended by several Big Tech CEOs.

Amodei has been leading the call surrounding AI safety concerns, which has been supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk but opposed by Trump and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Trump has called the concerns a “hoax,” even as fears escalated after former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned this month and predicted that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Zuckerberg is also expected to be at the meeting on Tuesday, in addition to OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

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Johnson told Fox Business on Monday that the meeting has “been a long time coming,” and that only Trump has “the gravitas to be able to pull them all together.”

“The leaders of all the different AI platforms all have different ideas and prescriptions on what the supposed guardrails should be,” he told the cable news channel. “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. We do not need to jump in and hyperregulate this because we’ll lose the race to China. The innovation is important to continue, but we have to strike the right balance. That’s what the conversation’s going to be about.”