<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) will not attend the meeting on artificial intelligence with President Donald Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and tech CEOs at the White House on Tuesday.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Thune informed reporters on Capitol Hill on Monday that he would not be present at the meeting as the Trump administration and Congress address calls from AI frontier model developers for a coordinated, international development slowdown.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“We’re having some meetings with some of those folks up here later in the week,” Thune stated. “I’ve got a couple of those tech people coming into town.”</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The tech CEOs expected to attend include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who had a private dinner with Trump at the White House on Sunday after a scheduling conflict during last week’s state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping, which was also attended by several Big Tech CEOs.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Amodei has been advocating for AI safety concerns, supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, but opposed by Trump and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Trump has referred to the concerns as a “hoax,” despite rising fears following the resignation of former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who predicted that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Zuckerberg is also expected to be at the meeting on Tuesday, along with OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Johnson told Fox Business on Monday that the meeting has “been a long time coming,” emphasizing that only Trump has “the gravitas to be able to pull them all together.”</p>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“The leaders of all the different AI platforms all have different ideas and prescriptions on what the supposed guardrails should be,” he said. “They have a corporate responsibility, as every corporation does, to create safe products, right? And there’s product liabilities laws that apply and a labyrinth of federal regulations on all this stuff already. We do not need a moratorium. We do not need to jump in and hyperregulate this because we’ll lose the race to China. The innovation is important to continue, but we have to strike the right balance. That’s what the conversation’s going to be about.”</p>