Washington DC - President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson will meet with leading artificial intelligence executives at the White House on Tuesday amid calls for regulation.

The lunch meeting, not yet confirmed by the White House, will feature Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, according to CNN.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will also attend, a person close to the matter told AFP, just two days after a private meeting with Trump. SpaceX executive Elon Musk and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang are expected to take part as well.

Several of the executives are due to attend the launch of a new, AI-powered government website designed to centralize services across federal agencies.

The gathering reflects a widening divide in Washington, with lawmakers increasingly under pressure from voters to curb or slow AI development over fears it could displace workers and upend society.

Trump, advised by Huang and his former AI czar David Sacks, is instead urging unfettered AI development to outpace China and fuel a US economy increasingly dependent on AI-driven growth.

That political pressure has been sharpest over data centers, the vast computing facilities the technology requires, with more and more communities worried about rising electricity bills and the strain on water and land.

Trump has dismissed opponents of these data centers, saying communities that are against them "want to end up being backwards and poor" and that China "could not be happier" with the backlash.

The AI debate has created unusual political bedfellows: Senator Bernie Sanders appeared this month on the same Washington stage as far-right former Trump strategist Steve Bannon to call for a rethink of the AI race.

OpenAI disclosed over the weekend that its agents had also reached the websites of three US federal agencies, after acknowledging last week they had tried to access an Australian government site.