Trump-Xi State Dinner Draws AI’s Biggest CEOs as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei Is Left Off Guest List

By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.

Some of the world’s most prominent artificial intelligence and technology executives gathered at the White House on Thursday night for President Donald Trump’s state dinner honoring Chinese President Xi Jinping, hours after AI emerged as a major subject in talks between the two leaders.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended with his wife, Lori Huang, alongside SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, AMD CEO Lisa Su and Apple CEO Tim Cook, according to CNBC.

The guest list also included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

One major AI executive was absent: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Amodei has publicly advocated slowing some aspects of artificial intelligence development because of potential risks from increasingly capable systems, while Trump has rejected what he characterizes as overly pessimistic warnings about AI and has favored continued American development of the technology.

Anthropic’s absence from the dinner therefore came against the backdrop of a broader disagreement between Amodei and the administration over the pace and risks of AI development, although no official explanation for his exclusion from the guest list was provided in the information available.

Artificial intelligence had already occupied a prominent place in Trump and Xi’s discussions earlier Thursday.

Trump previewed the issue that morning, writing on Truth Social, “Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is. That is China’s position also.”

Trump has begun referring to artificial intelligence as “Super Intelligence,” or SI.

No U.S. government readout of the leaders’ AI discussion had been released as of publication, leaving the Chinese government’s account as the most detailed public description of the exchange.

According to that account, Xi told Trump that the United States and China “may have competition, but they may cooperate even more.”

“The two sides can continue their dialogue on AI, exchange views on its risks and benefits, and jointly prevent the misuse and abuse of AI,” Xi said.

The Chinese leader also emphasized maintaining human authority over increasingly advanced systems.

AI “must be kept under human control,” Xi said, adding that “a people-centered approach should be upheld, and AI should be developed for the positive and for good, so that AI will serve the progress of humanity.”

The Chinese account quoted Trump as agreeing to “maintain dialogue and strengthen cooperation on AI.”

Those discussions followed another round of U.S.-China contacts involving the technology over the weekend.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng discussed what was described as a “U.S.-China AI dialogue,” including a communication mechanism intended for incidents that could escalate “up to a national security level.”

The arrangement has been compared to the Cold War-era communications channel between Washington and Moscow commonly known as the “red phone,” designed to provide governments with a direct way to communicate during potentially dangerous situations.

The combination of Thursday’s presidential talks and the technology-heavy state dinner underscored AI’s growing role in the U.S.-China relationship.

American companies represented at the dinner include many of the businesses developing the chips, computing infrastructure and AI models driving the global competition over the technology, while Washington and Beijing simultaneously confront questions involving national security, technological leadership and potential risks from increasingly advanced systems.

Amodei’s absence stood out against a guest list containing executives from most of the other major U.S. companies at the center of that competition, as Trump and Xi moved toward continued bilateral discussions over how artificial intelligence develops and how the two governments respond to its risks.