Trump, Xi to dine with OpenAI leaders amid AI regulation debate

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will be joined by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman during a state dinner at the White House this week, according to a new report.

Brockman is reportedly joining the world leaders despite not appearing on an initial, partial list of attendees provided to reporters on Friday, according to a source that spoke to Politico.

The list of attendees include people like Altman, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Apple CEO Tim Cook, among others.

A senior U.S. official who spoke to the outlet said that the dinner is “a very popular and hot ticketed event.”

The presence of Altman and Brockman at the state dinner comes at a contentious time for the AI industry. Altman, Musk and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have all called for the federal government to consider regulating AI development. A former Anthropic researcher claimed there was a more than 10 percent chance that AI could destroy humanity. Trump has rejected the idea of more regulation or slowing down development, insisting that continued work is necessary to ensure the U.S. — and not China — "wins AI."

Beijing has likewise dismissed concerns over AI threats as "manageable risks."

Ahead of the state dinner, UN human rights chief Volker Türk has called on the U.S. and Chinese leaders, along with AI research companies, to pull back on the tech's development, arguing that humanity is “on the cusp of irreversible change, affecting not just us but generations of humanity to come."

"The current race towards ever more powerful AI is a step change towards greater existential risks to every aspect of our lives," he wrote last week.

Trump rejected that call during a speech at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday.

“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globality scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter called ‘super intelligence.’ Changing the name,” he said.

He reasoned that the word “artificial” makes the “intelligence sound fake.”

“It is not fake. It’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports,” he said. “From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial.”

According to campaign finance records, Brockman and his wife gave a combined $25 million to MAGA Inc — a pro-Trump super PAC — in 2025. They were among the largest individual donors to Trump's campaign that year.

The donations he made were made under his own name and not on behalf of OpenAI, according to Politico.

Despite Trump's frequent invoking of the word "communist" to describe any person or policy he doesn't like, the president regularly praises Xi.

"He's a great gentleman; we get along great," Trump said earlier this month. "We have a very good trading relationship and, you know, they're a competitor and all of that, but we have a very good relationship with President Xi."

Trump also seemed to brush off reports that China had given satellite imagery to Iran.

"I think he's behaved reasonably well," Trump said of his Chinese counterpart.