Government officials, AI executives and some of the country’s most prominent CEOs plan to gather in the White House East Room on Thursday night for a state dinner honoring Chinese leader Xi Jinping, capping a day of elaborate ceremony aimed at stabilizing the fragile relationship between the United States and its chief geopolitical rival.
The guest list captures the complex connections between the world’s two largest economies, which remain deeply intertwined even as they compete to dominate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.
Xi and President Donald Trump will dine on a menu of sea bass crusted in toasted sesame seeds alongside the leaders of companies building some of the world’s most advanced AI models, at a time when U.S. officials worry that Chinese systems are rapidly catching up with the Americans. They’ll be joined by executives whose products depend on Chinese factories and materials, many of whom have shifted manufacturing elsewhere amid persistent trade tensions, and the heads of social networks and other companies banned in China.
Here’s a look at some of the prominent guests and what they have at stake:
Caught in the AI arms race
The AI industry’s top executives will attend the dinner at a moment when they’re divided over how to manage the technology’s risks, and whether they can collaborate with China to avert an AI-induced disaster.
On one side of that divide is OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, who has said in recent weeks that companies need to slow down development and that governments need to work together to create new oversight of the technology. Both positions put him at odds with the White House. Unlike its rival, Anthropic, however, OpenAI has avoided direct confrontation with the Trump administration.
He will be joined by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who with his wife has donated $25 million to a Trump-aligned super PAC. OpenAI does not allow access to its AI models from China, and it has frequently cast Beijing as a competitive threat as it lobbies for favorable regulation in Washington.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, a Trump ally, and founder of SpaceXAI, will also attend. He has joined calls by other CEOs to slow the pace of work on AI to improve safety.
On the other side of the debate is Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang who has dismissed concerns about the potential for AI to cause a catastrophe, and says that ensuring safety is a matter for AI companies to address themselves.
Nvidia has pushed for access to the Chinese market and last year won permission from the administration to sell some of its advanced AI chips there. That decision drew backlash from some national security experts and Democrats, who say the administration is providing China with the materials it needs to catch up in the AI race.
Tethered to China’s supply chain
The Trump administration has aggressively sought to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. through tariffs, but many of the guests at the dinner have companies that rely on China for its factories, components and cheaper goods.
For Apple executive chairman Tim Cook, China represents the company’s manufacturing backbone and one of its biggest markets. Though Apple has been reducing its reliance on Chinese manufacturing and has shifted parts of its supply chain to India in the face of tariffs, China still remains the primary assembly hub for the majority of iPhones sold around the world.
China is also a significant market for Apple, where it sells millions of iPhones annually. However, the company’s compliance with Chinese censorship and relationship with Beijing have at times been a political liability in Washington.
In addition to his SpaceXAI venture, Musk is the CEO and largest shareholder of Tesla, another American company that relies heavily on China for both manufacturing and sales. In an interview with China’s CCTV ahead of the dinner, Musk praised the company’s Shanghai factory as a “gem.” China is the world’s largest market and critical for the company, but it faces fierce competition from electric vehicle companies based there.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s marketplace heavily relies on Chinese sellers, which make up more than 50 percent of the company’s global sellers, according to data from Marketplace Pulse. (Bezos owns The Washington Post). Many of the company’s products — including Amazon’s own private-label goods — are manufactured in China and have been subject to the administration’s tariffs.
Shut out by the Great Firewall
Through its Great Firewall, China has banned or heavily restricted many of the most popular U.S. social networks and apps, including those run by two dinner attendees: Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Google launched its search engine in China in 2006, starting a years-long fight with Beijing over censorship. In 2010, after a series of cyberattacks and disputes over the government’s demands to censor search results, the company pulled its search engine out of mainland China. Google now has a limited presence there, mostly selling ads to Chinese exporters. It has said it plans to move production of its Pixel phones, watches and earbuds out of China by next year.
China also blocks Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. For years, Zuckerberg worked hard to reach users in China. He proposed extensive censorship measures, went jogging through Tiananmen Square and delivered a 20-minute speech in Mandarin at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. That changed in 2019, as TikTok, which was then Chinese-owned, gained traction. Zuckerberg began publicly criticizing China for exporting a dangerous model of internet censorship to the rest of the world, and he often raised the China threat when lobbying U.S. leaders.
The post Who is attending the White House dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping? appeared first on Washington Post.
