WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump will host a high-powered list of tech CEOs for a dinner at the White House on Thursday night.
The guest list is set to include Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a dozen other executives from the biggest artificial intelligence and tech firms, according to the White House.
One notable absence from the guest list is Elon Musk, once a close ally of Trump, whom the Republican president tasked with running the government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency. Musk had a public breakup with Trump earlier this year.
The dinner will be held in the Rose Garden, where Trump recently paved over the grassy lawn and set up tables, chairs and umbrellas that look strikingly similar to the outdoor setup at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
“The Rose Garden Club at the White House is the hottest place to be in Washington, or perhaps the world," White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. "The president looks forward to welcoming top business, political, and tech leaders for this dinner and the many dinners to come on the new, beautiful Rose Garden patio."
The event will follow a meeting of the White House's new Artificial Intelligence Education task force, which first lady Melania Trump will chair.
“During this primitive stage, it is our duty to treat AI as we would our own children — empowering, but with watchful guidance," she said in a statement. “We are living in a moment of wonder, and it is our responsibility to prepare America’s children.
The White House confirmed that the guest list for the dinner is also set to include Google founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and founder Greg Brockman, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, Blue Origin CEO David Limp, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, TIBCO Software chairman Vivek Ranadive, Palantir executive Shyam Sankar, Scale AI founder and CEO Alexandr Wang and Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman.
Isaacman was an associate of Musk whom Trump nominated to lead NASA, only to revoke the nomination around the time of his breakup with Musk. Trump cited the revocation of the nomination as one of the reasons Musk was upset with him and called Isaacman “totally a Democrat.”
The dinner was first reported Wednesday by The Hill.
Trump’s outreach to top tech executives could deepen emerging divides within the Republican Party.
One of Trump’s closest allies in Congress, Sen. Josh Hawley, delivered a sharp criticism of the tech industry during a speech at a conservative conference in Washington on Thursday morning. He criticized the lack of regulation around artificial intelligence and singled out Meta and ChatGPT.
The Missouri senator also blasted a recent congressional effort that nearly passed which would have barred states and local governments from regulating AI for ten years. Trump, meanwhile, has criticized states for holding back AI innovation with regulations.
Hawley accused conservatives of pushing to abandon states’ rights “all in the name of what? Big tech?”
“The government should inspect all of these frontier AI systems so we can better understand what the tech titans plan to build and destroy,” Hawley added.
At least some of the attendees at the president’s dinner are expected to participate in the task force meeting, which aims to develop AI education for American youths.
Last month, the first lady launched a nationwide contest for students in grades K-12 to use AI to complete a project or address a community challenge. The project was aimed at showing benefits of AI, while Trump has also highlighted its drawbacks.
Melania Trump lobbied Congress this year to pass legislation that imposes penalties for online sexual exploitation using imagery that is real or an AI-generated deepfake.
The president signed the “Take It Down Act” in May.
___
Associated Press writer Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.
Michelle L. Price, The Associated Press
