American tech billionaires filled the seats at President Trump’s flashy state dinner honoring Chinese leader Xi Jinping Thursday night, as concerns about the global AI race take center stage.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple Chairman Tim Cook, and AMD CEO Lisa Su were seen in photos at Trump and Xi’s table, at the very center of the festivities.
The invitees also included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai, and Michael Dell of Dell Technologies.
In contrast to a 2015 dinner then-President Barack Obama hosted for Xi, no Chinese business leaders showed up, the Washington Post noted.
Still, the dinner marked a rare opportunity for the most powerful figures in tech to rub elbows with Chinese state dignitaries, as innovators have been divided in a heated debate over whether the world needs to slow development of dangerous AI models or push ahead.
President Trump has shrugged off doomsday warnings about AI’s potential to harm humanity, including one chilling prediction that it could lead to human extinction by 2030 – instead arguing that the more pressing threat is China pulling ahead in the race.
Chinese officials have also dismissed the warnings as “fear mongering” and “Cold War” tactics, urging companies to push ahead with development. Xi has stated that China will take the lead in fostering AI collaboration among developing countries.
Despite rising tensions within the industry, pols and tech figures were all smiles at the elaborate soirée in the East Room of the White House, walking a red carpet on the North Portico steps before the event.
The dinner featured red blossoms and red linens in a nod to the color of China’s flag, a toast of Schramsberg “Blanc De Noir,” and a menu with Chinese influences, all overseen by First Lady Melania Trump.
Notably absent from the dinner was Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, one of the industry leaders who has been most aggressive in calling for more stringent regulations on AI companies – drawing blowback from Trump himself.
Amodei recently published a lengthy essay proposing a three-step plan for global tech giants to slow their development of AI models, after an Anthropic researcher quit his job and sounded the alarm over potential dangers of the technology.
Altman and Musk – longtime rivals who were locked in a messy legal battle earlier this year – each backed Amodei’s proposal, which requires cooperation from regulators and tech companies around the world.
Trump accused Amodei of “pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’” and argued that any slowdown in US development could help China.
“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!” the president wrote in a Truth Social post earlier this month.
Anthropic also butted heads with the government earlier this year when it refused to allow unfettered access to its technology for use in weaponry and mass surveillance.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a blacklisting of the company, though a federal judge later struck down the ban.
Huang, who has been pushing to tap into the massive Chinese market, and Zuckerberg, whose company recently launched a popular AI agent, have each argued that the warnings around AI dangers have been blown out of proportion, saying the matter of development should be left to companies themselves – not regulators.
