OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang are planning to attend a high-stakes state dinner at the White House next week with Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Former Apple CEO and current chair of its board, Tim Cook, is also set to attend, ABC News has confirmed.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sits for a conversation with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, September 15, 2026 in San Francisco.
Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images
Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude AI assistant, has not responded to a request for comment on whether CEO Dario Amodei will attend.
The White House has not responded to a request for comment about the state dinner guests.
President Donald Trump this week called Nvidia’s CEO while Huang was on a panel at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles. Video from the tech summit shows Huang on stage, answering the phone and putting Trump on speakerphone. In the conversation, Trump said the U.S. cannot afford to lose the AI race to China and called the warnings about AI’s danger a “hoax.”
A fierce debate is publicly playing out among top tech CEOs over how to regulate AI. Altman and Amodei have said the pace of AI development must “slow down” and government guardrails are necessary. Nvidia’s CEO and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg say the government should not step in.
In a 3,800-word essay on his website calling to “pace the frontier,” Anthropic’s CEO called on the U.S. to stop selling advanced AI computer chips to China. Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company that makes many of those chips.
Some of tech CEOs’ plans to attend the state dinner were first reported by CNN.
President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping arrive for a state dinner at the Great Hall of the People May 14, 2026, in Beijing.
Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo
The dinner comes amid Xi’s visit to Washington set for next week where AI and national security are expected to be discussed.
