House Speaker Mike Johnson said he and President Trump are planning to gather the leading developers of artificial intelligence at the White House for a meeting “within the next week.”
The Louisiana Republican said the meeting is intended to discuss a “responsible, balanced approach” to preventing AI from escaping human controls through a combination of developer self-policing and federal regulations. He spoke to Mr. Trump on Monday night to plan the confab.
“We are summoning together the top leaders, the CEOs of the AI providers, the ones that run the frontier labs and the others,” Mr. Johnson said Tuesday. “I think within the next week we will be together at the White House for an important meeting.”
Mr. Trump spent Monday publicly bashing as “a hoax” the warnings from AI developers that the technology is developing too rapidly, plus dismissed the need for new federal regulations, saying he’s a smart president who would ensure nothing bad happens.
Mr. Johnson said the president is trying to downplay the alarmism over AI wiping out humanity, not fully ruling out some regulatory guardrails so long as those safety efforts don’t stifle innovation.
“What the president is saying is you’re not all going to be dead in 10 years,” he said. “That’s a hoax.”
The speaker said Congress won’t shut down AI development. He called such an idea a “stupid, knee-jerk reaction” proposed by Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, and others on the left.
Mr. Johnson said the leaders of frontier — or cutting-edge — AI labs can self-police against catastrophic risks and don’t need the government to tell them to slow down development of the technology.
“If they want to slow it down, they should,” the speaker said. “But we cannot have a moratorium on the development of AI, because then we will lose our edge to China. And that has serious national security implications for every American family.”
Mr. Johnson said lawmakers in Congress have studied AI for years and are “not caught flat-footed” on the regulatory debate, but acknowledged they “don’t have the latest information.”
“We are not in the labs, with the frontier labs who have taken this technology many steps further than even when our own report was published,” he said, referring to a bipartisan House AI task force report released in December 2024.
Mr. Johnson endorsed some ideas for regulating AI, such as independent auditors to monitor the safety of the models, plus transparency requirements for the developers.
He dismissed the suggestion some have floated of a transnational regulatory agency over AI as unworkable.
“When they did that with nuclear power and nuclear bombs and all that tech, that took decades to develop,” the speaker said. “We don’t have that time with AI.”
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.