At a White House state dinner, proximity to the president is a measure of power—or at least of favor. At the glittering banquet for the Chinese leader Xi Jinping on September 24, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sat directly across from Donald Trump. The companies represented at their table were worth nearly $15 trillion. Open AI ’s Sam Altman was seated within spitting distance of his longtime antagonist Elon Musk. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was also on the guest list. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who had repeatedly sparred with the administration before a recent rapprochement, was not.

China looms over these men’s visions of the AI future, but they disagree sharply about it. For Amodei, whose firm has warned that AI may pose an “existential risk to humanity,” the prospect of Chinese advances is a source of dread.…