Sometimes the most important news is who stays home. Senate Majority Leader John Thune will not attend the White House meeting on artificial intelligence. He skipped the lunch with President Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson, and big tech bosses. This decision comes as leaders argue over how fast to build these new machines.
Thune told reporters on Monday he would not be there. Instead, he plans to meet with the tech folks in his own office later in the week. He said, “We’re having some meetings with some of those folks up here later in the week,” and “I’ve got a couple of those tech people coming into town”, according to the Washington Examiner.
While Thune stayed on Capitol Hill, the big names showed up in Washington. The list of attendees is heavy. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is there. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and Google’s Sundar Pichai are expected. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is also coming. Even Anthropic’s Dario Amodei will join, despite a recent private dinner with Trump. This group is supposed to talk about safety. But they do not all agree on what that means. Some want to slow down. Others want to race ahead. The White House says this gathering has “been a long time coming”.
The real story here is the clash of ideas. Some tech leaders fear the machines might get too smart too fast. One former researcher even warned they could “kill us all by the end of the decade”, according to NBC News. These voices want rules to keep things safe. But President Trump thinks that is nonsense. He has called those warnings a “hoax”. In a recent post, he wrote, “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX[…]”, according to ABC News.
Trump wants America to win the race against China. He told the United Nations that whoever wins AI wins the future. He said, “Whoever wins AI … whoever wins SI, whoever wins super intelligence, wins. That’s the group that wins, and we’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way”. He worries that new laws will slow down growth. He does not want to regulate the technology. House Speaker Mike Johnson sees it differently. He told a news channel, “The leaders of all the different AI platforms all have different ideas and prescriptions on what the supposed guardrails should be”.
So who decides the rules? It seems the President holds the power. Speaker Johnson noted that only Trump has “the gravitas to be able to pull them all together”. Johnson also said companies have a duty to make safe products. He added, “They have a corporate responsibility, as every corporation does, to create safe products, right? And there’s product liabilities laws that apply”.
But the CEOs are not all on the same page. Mark Zuckerberg says every lab must move at its own pace. He believes “every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely”. He pushed back on calls to slow down. Thune’s absence suggests Congress might want to talk more before acting. It is a busy week for big ideas.
