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FIRST ON FOX: A select group of tech industry titans and venture capitalists will gather Washington, DC, this week to welcome the incoming Trump administration and celebrate new opportunities for global innovation in artificial intelligence and entrepreneurship.
Presidents and CEOs of companies at the forefront of AI technology and their major financial backers, along with incoming administration staff, will attend a dinner Thursday hosted by Outside the Box Ventures, a company founded in last year by a journalist turned investment. banker Katherine Tarbox, along with Laurent Bili, the French ambassador to the US
Thursday’s dinner guest list includes Chief “DOGE.” Elon MuskSilicon Valley investor and GOP megadonor Peter Thiel, NVCA CEO Bobby Franklin, White House AI and cryptocurrency czar David Sacks, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, investor Joe Lonsdale and the co-founder of Narya Colin Greenspon.
“This meeting represents more than a discussion. We hope it symbolizes a new chapter in public-private collaboration to harness the transformative power of technology for the nation’s future,” a source close to the planning told Fox News Digital. The event comes days before President-elect Trump is inaugurated as the nation’s 47th president.
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Trump and Musk watch the launch of the sixth test flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket in November 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Major US employers want to take advantage of what Microsoft’s Brad Smith has called a “golden opportunity for American technology and economic competitiveness.” The goal is for the combined forces of industry leaders and government resources that Trump marshaled for Operation Warp Speed, his first administration’s lauded COVID-19 vaccine program, to be replicated for breakthroughs in AI.
Bili’s participation reflects France’s interest in being a leader in AI, with a global action summit on the rapidly developing technology to be held in Paris this February, and he believes the US is a valuable partner in that effort.
“We believe this is the hottest ticket for tech and venture capital leading up to the inauguration,” the source said. Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Franklin, the chief executive of the National Venture Capital Association, the venture capital industry’s trade group, confirmed that he plans to attend. He told Fox News Digital that there is high excitement in his industry for several of Trump’s hires with venture capital backgrounds, including Sacks, a billionaire tech executive, and Vice President-elect JD Vance.
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Katherine Tarbox, a former journalist turned investment banker, founded Outside the Box Ventures in 2024. Her company is hosting a gathering of big tech CEOs and venture capitalists in Washington, DC, ahead of the takeover of President-elect Trump’s possession, a source familiar with the planning said. (Company outside the box)
“One of our challenges is always to educate, and there’s always a lack of understanding of what the venture industry does, how it works with entrepreneurs, how it creates great technologies and drugs and everything else in the economy,” he said. said Franklin. “And to have people who understand that coming into administration is a wonderful and welcome situation from our perspective.”
The dinner comes at a critical time for the United States, which leads the world AI startups but it faces stiff competition from China and other foreign adversaries.
US companies received more than 40% of global AI funding in 2023, surpassing China and the European Union combined. That same year, US venture capital firms released $17.9 billion in funding for AI startups, contributing to the leaps and bounds of generative AI technology popularized by ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok.
US entities have filed more than 10,000 AI-related patents in the past five years, showing the deep bank of American innovators that Franklin and others believe Trump is willing to support.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (REUTERS/Adriano Machado/File)
But analysts warn that China’s recent advances in AI technology pose a challenge to US dominance in the field and may even threaten US national and economic security.
A recent report published by the American Edge Project warns that “China is rapidly advancing its own open source ecosystem as an alternative to American technology and is using it as a Trojan horse to implant its CCP values into the global infrastructure”.
The report called China’s progress “important and worrying”.
“Open source AI tools developed in China are already outperforming Western models in key benchmarks, while operating at much lower costs, accelerating global adoption. Through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) , which spans more than 155 countries on four continents, and its Digital Silk Road (DSR), China is exporting its technology around the world, fostering greater global dependence, undermining democratic norms and threatening US leadership and global security.”
Vice President-elect JD Vance has a background in venture capital that has excited industry leaders eager to partner with the Trump administration. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images/File)
There is a strong expectation that the Trump administration will let the private sector lead the way as the US confronts China. While the Biden administration prioritized establishing “guardrails” for AI development through regulatory agencies, Perkins Coie analysts note that Trump has pledged to roll back an executive order from the of Biden that sets policy on federal agency purchases and uses of AI. The 2024 Republican platform claimed that Biden’s policies “hinder innovation and impose radical left-wing ideas,” apparently referring to requirements that the National Institute of Standards and Technology create guidance to ensure that models of AI are impartial and do not discriminate on the basis of race or sex.
In addition, Trump’s appointment of Sacks as the AI czar indicates that his thinking on AI is in line with associates of Sacks, Musk and Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and favor a deregulatory agenda.
“The new czar will likely be tasked with coordinating with federal agencies and external stakeholders to ensure consistent guidance on the use of AI in the federal government. We hope Sacks was less focused on the potential harms of AI and more focused on promoting and facilitating AI innovation with fewer constraints,” said Perkins Coie.
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However, Thursday’s meeting is a strictly non-partisan event The great interest of Silicon Valley in building relations with a Republican administration would seem to indicate a change in political priorities.
Previously, issues like immigration and climate change drove Big Tech away from the GOP. And when Trump first ran for president, his populist MAGA movement was an unknown factor that led many entrepreneurs to keep their distance.
But a growing recognition of AI as a national priority has appeared to bridge that gap. So does a more defined Trump, with key players in his second administration having ties to the world of venture capital.
“You know, he was definitely a political outsider who won in 2016,” Franklin said. “Now, he’s not an outsider.”
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.
