Trump’s AI Billionaire Lunch Dates Have So Far Spent $145 Million On Political Candidates

With less than five weeks until the midterm elections, fears of runaway AI agents hacking websites and possibly destroying humanity have spread into the political sphere. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump responded by convening an elite group of the country’s leading AI executives to the East Room of the White House for a two-hour lunch.

Seated beside Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and SpaceX’s Elon Musk—two of the 10 richest people in the world—the president sounded an optimistic tone, brandishing a brief, one-page document calling on AI companies to self-police their frontier models. He called the agreement “morally binding.”

Only six of the 14 billionaires in attendance—Musk, Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and Google’s Sundar Pichai—actually signed it. Among those who didn’t: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, AMD’s Lisa Su and Palantir’s Alex Karp and Shyam Sankar. (Oracle’s Larry Ellison, a known Trump ally, didn’t attend. Neither did OpenAI’s Sam Altman due to the company’s DevDay event.)

Some of those in attendance at Trump’s lunch, particularly Anthropic’s billionaire cofounder Dario Amodei, have recently pushed for greater government involvement to slow down the breakneck pace of frontier model development. That didn’t materialize at the lunch, and in fact the president has called AI risks “a hoax.”

But public opposition to AI and data centers has been picking up steam, with politicians on both sides of the aisle taking on more anti-AI positions on the stump.

The politically active AI moguls have so far had a pretty good track record. Of the more than 400 candidates they or their associated PACs supported, 348 advanced to the general election, including 102 who faced uncontested races or whose opponents withdrew. Only 19 lost their primaries and four ended their candidacies. It’s now up to voters to decide if they want their government to impose stiffer regulations than the sheet of paper signed on Tuesday.