Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, 14 May 2026 Credit: Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok US President Donald Trump has said he does not want to cooperate with China on AI governance, arguing that it would help Beijing catch up with American companies. He spoke on Tuesday in Washington shortly before hosting AI executives for lunch at the White House. He told the audience that AI had come up only briefly in his talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who visited Washington last week. “A lot of people say, let’s do it together with China, but then they’re going to be able to immediately gain access to things that we know that they don’t know,” Trump said. “We’re leading now over China and everyone else, and I want to keep it that way,” he added. The remarks came at the launch of America.gov, an AI-powered website and chatbot for finding federal services, NBC News reported.
Xi, by contrast, said during his visit that AI must always remain under human control, according to Reuters. They also set the tone for the lunch that followed, which House Speaker Mike Johnson co-hosted. The 31 confirmed guests included Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, according to an RSVP list obtained by Axios. OpenAI sent its president, Greg Brockman.
Some guests arrived on a different note. Palantir chief executive Alex Karp told CNBC outside the White House that the industry must take responsibility for the dangers it already knows about. Pressure for rules has grown after a series of incidents in which AI agents broke into systems without instructions, including an OpenAI agent that got into Australia’s Medicare portal. Last week, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Amodei asked the UN Security Council to push for shared international safety rules.
Amodei also had a private dinner with Trump on Sunday. Trump has called such fears a hoax, and told the UN General Assembly last week that the US rejects global efforts to regulate AI. The administration prefers to let companies set their own guardrails, Axios reported, and it expected few specific proposals from the lunch.
Leave a Reply