The Silicon Valley executives who spent years silencing conservative voices are now sitting down with President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson to write the rules on artificial intelligence—a move that risks entrenching Big Tech's monopoly while locking free-speech platforms out of the conversation.
On Tuesday, the architects of the internet censorship apparatus will join AI frontier bosses at the White House for a luncheon and all-day event on AI policy. When the oligarchs who deplatformed dissidents get to regulate their own industry, the public usually gets sold out.
The guest list reads like a who's who of the censorship cartel and AI oligarchy. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai—whose platforms have spent a decade throttling populist voices—are confirmed attendees, according to CNBC. They will be joined by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Vice President JD Vance and Speaker Johnson will host the event, which includes panel discussions on AI, energy, and space, alongside the rollout of a new federal AI website. Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown will also attend.
The gathering puts Big Tech's biggest players in the room to shape a regulatory framework that could easily be weaponized against smaller, free-speech-friendly competitors like Gab. Before Tuesday's group lunch, Trump met privately with Amodei on Sunday night. That meeting follows a bitter clash between Anthropic and the Pentagon. As Europe Says reported, a federal appeals court recently upheld the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, allowing the Defense Department to strip Anthropic's Claude models from its systems. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump accused the company of endangering national security after Amodei resisted letting the military use his AI for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Trump has pushed for rapid AI development to maintain the United States' estimated 18-month lead over China, dismissing AI safety fears as a "hoax" and a "scam," CNBC reported. Amodei, however, has called for companies to "pace the frontier," warning that safety research is lagging behind capabilities. A former Anthropic researcher even accused frontier labs of "gambling with our lives."
Notably, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk have sided with Amodei's calls for a slowdown. Musk, who attended last week's state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping alongside Apple's Tim Cook and AMD's Lisa Su, has a vested interest in the regulatory shape of this industry. Amodei was conspicuously absent from the Xi dinner.
The central question is whether "safety" regulations will be used to build a moat around the same trillion-dollar companies that spent years suppressing American dissent—or whether the administration will prioritize an open market where free-speech platforms can compete.
