Saturday, October 17, 2026
Politics

Trump hosts AI leaders as safety debate reaches the White House

Some of the biggest names in tech will head to the White House on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are meeting with top AI executives as Washington debates how — and how much — to regulate the technology.

QR code for SAN app download

Download the Straight Arrow app today to get the stories that matter free from manipulation, bias or agenda.™

Point phone camera here

Details on the meeting

Expected to attend are OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown is also expected to attend.

Johnson says the goal is to find what he calls the “right balance” between regulation and innovation.

“Instead of just smothering this with red tape, which is always the government’s reflex, and I think would be wrong and frankly dangerous to national security if we did it here, we want to continue the innovation,” Johnson said. “We want to keep America’s lead over China and all of our other competitors, but we want to make sure that it’s being done in a safe way. So, a little oversight, a little transparency, I think, would go a long way here.”

The meeting comes just two days after Trump had a private dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Amodei and other AI leaders have been pushing for a slowdown in AI development and stronger safeguards. They argue slowing development could reduce the potential risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems.

Where Trump stands on AI

Trump has taken a very different view, rejecting calls to slow AI development and calling fears that the technology could threaten humanity a “hoax.”

Last week, he told the U.N. the U.S. is going to “encourage it, not rein it in.”

Round out your reading