"It'll be a very popular and hot-ticketed event," the official said, adding that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk, Apple head Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai will also attend. The dinner follows Xi's visit to Washington, where AI is set to loom large in talks between the two leaders.
AI at the centre of talks
The United States and China are the two dominant powers in the AI race, and the debate in Washington is dominated by the view that leading developers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta — cannot afford to slow their pace of innovation for fear that China will pull ahead. China, long seen as trailing the US on cutting-edge AI, has been closing the gap fast.
Washington has long tried to slow China's progress with export controls on the advanced chips needed for cutting-edge AI, blocking access to top-end US semiconductors such as those made by Nvidia. Despite their bitter rivalry, hope remains that the two superpowers can agree on at least a communication channel on AI safety when the leaders meet.
Safety debate intensifies
The call for safeguards has been amplified by dire warnings from industry insiders. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon recently described how those building the technology "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade", and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay urging caution and a slowdown in development.
Earlier this week, US Attorney General Todd Blanche said the US could not afford to lose the AI race to China, while pledging Justice Department action against criminal conduct linked to AI, including alleged theft of technology from American companies.
What business leaders want
For the tech chiefs at the table, the stakes are commercial as much as geopolitical. Access to chips, data centre expansion and regulatory certainty all hang on the tone set between Washington and Beijing — making this dinner as much a business summit as a diplomatic one.
Markets are watching the menu
Investors will be parsing the dinner's aftermath as closely as diplomats. Any signal of cooperation on AI safety — or, conversely, tougher export controls — moves markets in semiconductors, cloud infrastructure and AI software. Nvidia alone has hundreds of billions in market value tied to how the US-China chip relationship evolves.
For the tech chiefs in the room, the calculation is straightforward: regulatory clarity and stable supply chains are worth more than any single quarter's results. This dinner is their chance to make that case directly to both presidents at once.
