They gathered in the East Room after Trump and Xi spent roughly 90 minutes behind closed doors earlier in the day, with AI, trade, Taiwan, Iran and other strategic issues hanging over a relationship Washington and Beijing are trying to stabilize. No major breakthrough emerged from those talks.
🇺🇸 🇨🇳 Trump and Xi entered the White House state dinner tonight surrounded by many of the people who will shape the technological and economic competition between the United States and China over the next decade.
The guest list brought together a concentration of American technological power. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of OpenAI. Elon Musk. Nvidia's Jensen Huang. Apple's Tim Cook. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg. Google's Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Wall Street was there too, alongside senior members of the Trump administration, Supreme Court justices and some of America's most powerful corporate leaders.
They gathered in the East Room after Trump and Xi spent roughly 90 minutes behind closed doors earlier in the day, with AI, trade, Taiwan, Iran and other strategic issues hanging over a relationship Washington and Beijing are trying to stabilize. No major breakthrough emerged from those talks.
The dinner also brought together executives with sharply different views of how the next phase of AI development should proceed.
Altman has moved toward deliberate pacing and greater outside oversight. Musk has expressed support for slowing under certain conditions and proposed adversarial safety testing among major labs.
Jensen Huang has taken a different position: AI safety is an engineering responsibility, companies should pace themselves when necessary, but Washington does not need new laws or a broader slowdown regime.
Former White House AI adviser David Sacks, another guest, has become one of the strongest critics of coordinated pacing.
Their companies also have very different relationships with China.
Nvidia wants access to the Chinese market. Apple remains deeply connected to Chinese manufacturing and consumers. Tesla operates a major Shanghai factory. Google, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp remain blocked or heavily restricted in China.
OpenAI does not offer its models there and has repeatedly described Chinese AI development as a strategic competitive challenge.
All of this comes as Chinese models narrow parts of the capability gap, Washington tightens its focus on chips and distillation, and the U.S. AI industry debates whether slowing frontier development for safety could hand Beijing an advantage.
Trump has made his own position increasingly explicit: America should not stifle AI development because, in his formulation, whoever wins the race for AI, or “superintelligence,” as he now calls it, wins.
Many of the people debating how that competition should be managed were therefore sitting tonight at the same dinner as the leader of the country at the center of America's technological rivalry.
🎥 President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump welcome President Xi Jinping and Peng Liyuan to the White House state dinner.
