Trump hosts AI industry leaders at White House, unveils new federal website
The president dismissed calls for AI safety regulation as executives including Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jensen Huang joined a White House lunch marking the rollout of a new government web portal, America.gov.
President Donald Trump hosted the chief executives of the nation's leading artificial intelligence companies at the White House on Tuesday, using the gathering to argue against new federal regulation of the technology even as several of his guests have previously warned publicly about the risks it poses.
The lunch, held in the East Room at 12:30 p.m., brought together Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, Palantir chief executive Alex Karp and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. House Speaker Mike Johnson also attended, along with Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown.
The lunch was one part of a larger, all-day event built around the launch of America.gov, a new AI-powered federal website intended to consolidate government information now scattered across dozens of individual agency sites. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other cabinet officials joined panel discussions during the event.
Rejecting a "hoax"
Trump used the occasion to frame artificial intelligence primarily as a geopolitical contest with China, saying the United States is "leading now over China by a lot," according to an ABC News account of the meeting. He dismissed warnings from AI researchers about existential risk from the technology as a "hoax," and said he would not "stifle growth" of an industry he described as potentially larger than the Industrial Revolution. Johnson echoed the message, calling for the industry to rely on self-regulation rather than federal rules, citing competition with China.
What happens next
No new legislation emerged from Tuesday's meeting, and the administration has shown no sign of shifting from its light-touch approach to AI oversight ahead of the November midterm elections. America.gov is now live, while congressional Democrats and AI safety researchers are likely to keep pressing for binding federal standards.
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