By Alexandra Alper and Courtney Rozen
WASHINGTON, Sept 29 (Reuters) – US President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning said he does not want to work with Chinese President Xi Jinping on governing AI technology, adding that doing so would make it harder for US companies to build better AI products than their Chinese counterparts.
“We’re leading now over China and everyone else, and I want to keep it that way,” Trump said at an event in Washington on Tuesday morning.
Trump also said that he discussed AI with Xi when he visited the US last week, adding that the US already works with Xi’s government “in so many ways.”
Pressure is mounting on the Trump administration to address the risks of AI technology to the public, after OpenAI and Anthropic reported their AI agents had gone rogue and hacked into customers’ systems without instructions to do so. The intrusions prompted researchers to warn that some AI developers believe the technology could kill humans within a decade, fueling calls for action from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
Trump will meet later in the day at the White House with tech executives to discuss AI technology. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Palantir’s Alex Karp and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman are expected to attend, according to company spokespeople and sources familiar with the meeting plans. From the Trump administration, tech adviser Michael Kratsios and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick will be there, as will US House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The gathering will focus on finding a balance between innovation and oversight, Republican Johnson said on Monday, as concerns about rogue AI agents’ potential to harm humans have seeped into the public consciousness, boosting calls for regulation. Trump has called the fears of AI’s threat to humanity a “hoax.”
Bipartisan legislative efforts in the Senate centered around AI regulation have stalled. Senator Ted Cruz, one of the Republicans involved in the discussions, said on Tuesday that he hopes to “move forward with it” after the November midterm elections.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the goals or topics for the meeting.
Trump has repeatedly downplayed concerns about AI, stressing the importance of maintaining the country’s competitive edge over China and pointing to the Justice Department as a pre-existing guardrail for AI. Johnson echoed those sentiments in an interview with Fox Business Network on Monday.
“We do not need a moratorium. We do not need to jump in and hyper-regulate this, because we’ll lose the race to China,” he said. “The innovation is important to continue, but we have to strike the right balance. That’s what the conversation is going to be about.”
But a nationwide Reuters/Ipsos poll from September 17 to 20 shows some 73% of respondents worry that AI companies haven’t done enough to prevent AI from causing serious harm to society, and 55% of people said it would be good to slow AI development.
Anthropic’s Amodei has been vocal about the threat of AI, telling the UN Security Council on September 23 that if managed poorly, “AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole.” That warning resurfaced in the company’s IPO prospectus, Reuters reported on Monday, even as Anthropic seeks a $2 trillion valuation for a technology that it says could outstrip industrialization in terms of its imprint on the global economy.
Under an executive order signed by Trump in June, AI developers are asked to voluntarily submit “covered frontier models” to the US government for review up to 30 days before releasing them to trusted partners.
Before the meeting, Trump will speak at an event unveiling a new America.gov website with tech CEOs and Vice President JD Vance in attendance.
The meeting also comes after Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the White House last week for talks with Trump that revealed divergent views on AI. While Trump on social media insisted Xi agreed with his plan to “leave it exactly where it is,” Xi appeared to favor a more hands-on approach.
“We have both the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good, and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the well-being of the people,” Xi said.
(Reporting by Alexandra Alper and Courtney Rozen; additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; editing by David Gaffen and Nick Zieminski)
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