Tech leaders arrive at White House for AI luncheon with Trump

Major technology leaders converged on the White House on Tuesday for a luncheon with President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson as calls for an artificial intelligence slowdown and regulation reach a fever pitch.

“The main issue that you have and I have is we have to take responsibility for the dangers we’re aware of,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp told CNBC outside the White House on Tuesday. “All of us do. And by the way, American people don’t want separate rules for tech people and for themselves.”

A seating chart posted to Trump’s Truth Social account showed the president seated next to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, followed by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google‘s Sundar Pichai.

The chart shows Vice President JD Vance opposite the president, between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Johnson.

Other attendees include Microsoft‘s Satya Nadella, Anthropic‘s Dario Amodei and Tom Brown, and OpenAI‘s president Greg Brockman. OpenAI is simultaneously hosting its annual DevDay developer conference in San Francisco. John Ternus, Apple‘s new CEO, did not appear on the list.

The luncheon comes alongside an all-day event hosted by the president and vice president over a new AI-powered chatbot for government websites known as America.gov.

Concerns over the rapid pace of AI development have intensified in Washington and Silicon Valley as cases of agent-orchestrated attacks mount and major researchers warn of serious consequences for humanity.

Frontier lab leaders Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have joined the calls for a slowdown, facing off against leading tech peers and the president.

This week, OpenAI postponed the release of its latest GPT-6.1 Astra model over safety concerns. Just last week, the company said it was conducting an “extensive” review of model behavior.

The AI lab has disclosed several incidents of unauthorized model behavior since the infamous Hugging Face attack sparked concerns over rogue AI earlier this summer.

Ahead of Tuesday’s White House lunch, Anthropic’s Amodei attended a private dinner Sunday with the president, following his striking absence from a state dinner for the Chinese president. Sunday’s dinner was the first one-on-one gathering between the two leaders, according to a person familiar with the visit.