Tech executives and Trump administration officials are quietly arranging a closed-door meeting on the future of artificial intelligence next week — on the sidelines of Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit to the White House — and the American workers whose livelihoods hang in the balance won't be at the table.
The people who stand to profit most from AI are the ones shaping its rules, and they're doing it in private rooms while a foreign adversary sits down the hall. CNN reports that administration officials are "privately discussing possible logistics for a meeting with the executives about the future of AI and the risks that accompany it," though nothing has been finalized. Xi is not currently expected to participate. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are among those expected to attend Trump's state dinner for Xi and could join the AI meeting, according to CNN.
A Trump administration official offered the familiar boilerplate: "The Administration is in regular contact with AI frontier labs, and will continue engaging with the tech industry to cement America's AI dominance while keeping Americans safe." Cement America's AI dominance — for whom? The same companies building the tools that will displace American workers?
Altman, who has publicly warned about AI's existential dangers, told Fortune Magazine last week that Trump and Xi would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize if they reached an agreement on AI development. "Even if just the US and China could agree on some shared standards and testing for development of this technology, I think that'd be a wonderful accomplishment that the two of them can deliver," Altman said. Shared standards with the regime that steals American intellectual property and subsidizes its tech sector to crush U.S. competitors — that's the vision on offer.
Trump himself has dismissed AI doomsday talk. "AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX," he posted on social media Monday, calling calls for guardrails part of a "SICK conspiracy." He's right that the doomsday panic is overblown — but that doesn't mean the people building this technology should write their own regulations in private.
House Speaker Mike Johnson insisted the timing is coincidental: "We've been talking about this for quite some time and all the discussion from the weekend and the first couple days this week prompted us to go ahead and schedule it." He declined to confirm whether the meeting was actually scheduled. Convenient.
The Verge noted Huang's growing proximity to Trump — the Nvidia CEO took a call from the president during a Los Angeles summit this week and put him on speakerphone for the crowd. Nvidia's fortunes depend on AI data center demand. Follow the money: Huang has every reason to cozy up to the administration writing the rules that govern his business.
Representatives for Meta, Anthropic, Google, and SpaceXAI did not respond to requests for comment.
The question isn't whether AI needs rules. It's who writes them — and whether it's always the same people who cash the checks.
