President Donald Trump is planning to hold a state dinner next week to mark a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping, and several tech industry leaders are expected to attend.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Apple Executive Chairman Tim Cook are both reportedly planning to attend the state dinner.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is also expected to attend the event, a person familiar with the matter told FOX Business.
The tech leaders’ anticipated attendance at the Trump-Xi state dinner comes at a time of geopolitical tensions, including over the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and access to both models and the chips that power them.
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The U.S. and China are locked in a competition in which the two world powers are racing to develop more capable AI tools, which have been a source of tension between the countries.
China’s access to specialized chips that power advanced AI models has been restricted through the U.S. government’s use of export controls on advanced semiconductors, like those made by Nvidia.
Huang has been critical of those restrictions and said in May that China has “all the chips they need” despite the U.S. restrictions.
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American companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have relied on using frontier models, which are proprietary and not available for use without purchasing a license, to gain their edge in the AI race. Chinese tech companies have used distillation as a means of using open-weight models to keep up with U.S. firms’ frontier models.
Altman and other tech leaders have recently been discussing steps to rein in AI development to ensure the safety and alignment of those models amid concerns about their potential impact on humanity.
“It is the responsibility of the AI companies ourselves to develop the technology safely and to properly test it,” Huang told reporters. “If it’s not ready, just hold it back. You should go as fast as you can, but no faster than that.”
State dinners are among the highest diplomatic honors a U.S. president can bestow on a foreign leader.
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Next week’s state dinner comes after Xi hosted a state dinner for Trump when he visited China in May. That event was also attended by Elon Musk, Huang and Cook – who was still CEO at the time and has recently transitioned into an executive chairman role at Apple.
The Trump-Xi state dinner will be the second hosted by Trump during his second term, as the first was held during a visit by Britain’s King Charles and Queen Camilla.
During his first term, he hosted state dinners for French President Emmanuel Macron in 2018 and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in 2019.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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