WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday promised the U.S. government wouldn't limit the development of artificial intelligence despite calls for caution from top executives of AI firms, including some who gathered with him in Washington.
“I will never stifle the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” Trump said at the unveiling of an AI chatbot, America.gov, intended to help Americans navigate government
services. “We can’t stifle it, and we’re leading by a lot.”
Top AI executives lunched with Trump at the White House Tuesday, including Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Elon Musk, whose X social media platform includes its own AI model, Grok.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sat to Trump's right at Tuesday's White House lunch, according to a seating chart the president posted on Truth Social. Musk sat to Trump's left. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also attended.
Trump's bullishness on AI contrasts with the alarms sounded recently by some AI executives, including Amodei, who earlier this month called for leading firms to slow down their development of the technology. Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also called for allowing safety measures to catch up as companies reported mounting examples of AI agents going rogue.
Other executives, particularly Huang and Zuckerberg, have downplayed the concerns about runaway AI and underscored the responsibility of each company to ensure the safety of their products.
Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Republican Speaker of the House, Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson, also attended.
The unveiling of the AI chatbot occurred at a daylong event in Washington during which multiple Trump administration officials celebrated a “Golden Age” fueled by what Trump insists on calling “super intelligence," rather than artificial intelligence. Secretary of State Marco Rubio highlighted that America.gov could soon be used to apply for a first-time passport fully online, without an in-person visit to a processing center that is currently required.
Speaking to reporters after the lunch with tech CEOs, Trump said there had been widespread agreement on “self-regulation” by the AI developers, “and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that."
He also said the executives had agreed to assuage the bipartisan opposition to data centers cropping up in local communities across the country, by providing more financial support to local schools or taking steps to reduce energy costs.
“You’re going to see, data centers are going to be very popular," Trump said. If the opposition continued, Trump suggested, “they’ll be forced to go overseas or other locations.”
Also Tuesday, Altman said in a television interview that the company is increasingly focused on safety. The day before, his company halted the rollout of a new model over safety concerns.
“We are pacing our progress, which includes sometimes not training a model,” he said on CNBC. “We have to do these in a way where we can make very confident safety cases and claims, so that people don’t have a bunch of anxiety.”
For his part, Trump on Tuesday portrayed the race to develop AI as largely a global competition between the United States and China, with the U.S. in the lead. He said there would be a winner and a loser, with no “second place.”
The two countries agreed last week to establish a channel for handling AI-related incidents during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Washington. But Trump underscored Tuesday that he didn't want to cooperate too much with China: "I didn’t want to do anything, because we’re leading. Why would I want to do anything?”
