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 was expected to 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.
But as rain began falling at the White House Thursday afternoon, officials decided to move the event to the White House State Dining Room because of inclement weather, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The event follows a meeting Thursday afternoon of the White House's new Artificial Intelligence Education task force, which first lady Melania Trump chaired and some of the tech leaders participated in.
“The robots are here. Our future is no longer science fiction,” she said as she opened the meeting.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna and Code.org President Cameron Wilson were among those participating in the task force.
The White House confirmed that the guest list for the dinner was also set to include Google founder Sergey Brin, 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 government should inspect all of these frontier AI systems so we can better understand what the tech titans plan to build and destroy,” the Missouri senator said.
Trump has embraced AI-created imagery and frequently shares it online, despite his complaints earlier in the week about the technology being used to create misleading videos.
Late Wednesday night, he posted a string of AI-generated memes and videos, such as one depicting him interacting with the man pictured in the Cracker Barrel logo, one showing California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff with an extremely elongated neck, and one with Trump’s face superimposed on a pole vaulter as it appears to leap over a Cracker Barrel banner, among other postings.
On Tuesday, Trump said a video showing items being thrown out of an upstairs window of the White House must have been created by AI, despite his team seeming to have confirmed the video’s veracity hours earlier.
Trump then said, “If something happens that’s really bad, maybe I’ll have to just blame AI.”
The first lady, at her event Thursday, likewise highlighted both the potential and peril of AI.
“As leaders and parents we must manage AI’s growth responsibly,” she said, calling for both action and caution. “During this primitive stage, it is our duty to treat AI as we would our own children — empowering, but with watchful guidance.”
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, but the first lady 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.
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Associated Press writers Joey Cappelletti and Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco in San Francisco contributed to this report.
Michelle L. Price, The Associated Press
