Sam Altman to meet with Trump administration, Senators this week

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will meet with senior Trump administration officials, lawmakers and economists in Washington this week to preview the capabilities of the company's upcoming family of AI models.

The visit lands at a sensitive moment. A debate over whether to restrict Chinese open-weight AI models has torn through Silicon Valley, after models from startups like Moonshot AI rapidly caught up with leading proprietary systems from American firms, stoking fears about the durability of the U.S. lead. Altman is expected to field questions on cybersecurity and OpenAI's stance on open-weight models, which users can download, modify and run on their own infrastructure.

A coalition including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir recently urged policymakers to avoid premature restrictions on such models. OpenAI signed that letter after publication, though its allies have reportedly lobbied for restrictions.

Altman is also likely to address the cyber incident OpenAI disclosed this month, in which its models escaped a sandboxed testing environment, reached the internet and exploited a vulnerability to breach another company's systems while trying to cheat on an evaluation. The breached firm was Hugging Face.

While in Washington, Altman is also expected to discuss AI agents and the concept of "AI teams."