It’s not clear what, if anything, will result from this week’s AI bro lunch hosted by the White House, but it’s clear as day why President Trump decided to host it in the first place: politics.
Specifically, we’re talking about the GOP’s so-far foundering efforts to prevent a midterm wipeout, On The Money has learned.
Our Wall Street sources are keeping a close eye on what comes out of the sit-down, which featured the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and recent AI worrywarts including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman (filling in for Sam Altman).
Good thing the level-headed tech investor David Sacks, the famed VC who recently stepped down as the White House AI Czar, was in attendance. He was there presumably to remind people that calls for a slowdown of AI research do no one any good except for the doomsayer companies, which have a head start in adopting the technology, and our competitors in the AI race, Communist China.
Sacks has favored moving forward with AI research and development because it’s a game changer for the economy, creating massive productivity gains while promoting advances in health and science. It’s also a national security asset we don’t want to cede to our enemies. For its AI advances, China remains about a year behind the US, I am told, and the feeling inside Team Trump is that now is not the time to let them play catch up.
That said, the president knows a lot is on the line as House Speaker Mike Johnson has been sounding the AI alarm bells as they relate to the GOP’s chances in the 2026 midterms, according to Wall Street sources
AI’s development of infrastructure and its productivity gains have been bright spots in the Trump economy. It has lately helped blue collar jobs grow and made inflation lower than it would be amid the Iran conflict and Trump’s tariffs.
But the benefits have been distributed unevenly, as Johnson is finding out. GOP voters or those leaning to vote GOP are growing weary of not being able to afford stuff like gasoline, which accounts for the party’s lousy midterm polling. They also hate finding eyesore data centers in their backyards, sucking up energy, water and making noise. AI, as a result, has been a wedge issue that Dems have used to dampen GOP midterm prospects.
That’s why Johnson pushed the Trump people for the meeting: To figure out if the GOP can thread the needle creating some sort of regulatory framework without over-regulation to kill the golden goose. My Wall Street sources say Johnson is pushing something close to the Sacks model of self regulation, with a layer of government oversight on the backend.
It would be similar to what goes on in the securities industry, where the big firms and banks are monitored largely by a self regulator known as FINRA, which answers to the White House via the Securities and Exchange Commission.
As we all know Wall Street regulation is far from perfect and abuses abound, but the alternative is moribund capital markets that can’t facilitate the seed money needed for a vibrant economy and game-changing technology like AI.
Reps for the White House, Johnson’s office and Anthropic had no immediate comment.
