President Donald Trump will present the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology to six prominent technology leaders this Thursday. The ceremony takes place at the White House during the Science: A New Golden Age Summit, an event dedicated to the development of superintelligence.
The recipients of the National Medal of Science include Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, AMD CEO Lisa Su, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The National Medal of Technology will be awarded to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell.
The list of honorees excludes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. While the White House provided no official explanation for the selection, the exclusion follows recent tensions between the administration and these AI companies regarding military contracts and development policies.
Elon Musk, who currently co-leads the Pentagon’s Project Meridian study on future warfare, returns to the administration's favor despite a previous public rift in 2025. Meanwhile, Anthropic remains on a Pentagon blacklist following a court ruling in September regarding its refusal to support autonomous weapons.
The summit focuses on maintaining American leadership in innovation. According to Bloomberg Intelligence, China has narrowed the gap in AI benchmark scores to 3 percent. President Trump has explicitly rejected calls for a slower pace of AI development, citing the need to maintain a competitive advantage.
