On Tuesday, President Donald Trump convened a two-hour AI luncheon in the East Room, bringing together 34 people from government, Silicon Valley and finance. The gathering was nominally about artificial intelligence, but its choreography underscored a sharper contest over who gets to shape Washington’s approach to the technology.¹

The closest seats went to Nvidia chief Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief, who flanked Trump. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai sat one place away, while Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella were across the table. The lineup placed the companies spending tens of billions on AI models and data centers at the heart of the president’s orbit.¹

That arrangement also carried policy meaning. Huang has pressed the White House to ease export controls on AI chips to China and to keep the sector free from regulation. Musk’s seat, meanwhile, signaled a repaired relationship after his months-long public dispute with Trump over policy earlier in the administration.¹

By contrast, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei — among the industry’s most prominent voices for aggressive regulation — sat toward the far end of the table. He was joined in a room that included Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson, officials who see formalized safeguards as a potential drag on US competitiveness.¹

The divide was visible after the meal as well: Musk appeared with other technology leaders outside the White House while Johnson addressed reporters following what was described as Trump’s “Super Intelligence luncheon.”clem 🤗 (ClementDelangue)²

The luncheon did not settle the argument over AI rules. It did make clear whose case was physically — and politically — closest to the president.