President Donald Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science on Thursday. Musk is one of six tech leaders honored, while OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, the best-known AI lab chiefs, are not.
The medals are America’s highest honors for science and technology. Trump has never presented either one across his two terms.
Who Is Getting Trump’s Science and Technology Medals
Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and AMD CEO Lisa Su will receive the science medal. Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will receive the technology medal.
The awards will be handed out at the White House “Science: A New Golden Age Summit.” The event will focus on superintelligence, meaning AI that outperforms humans at most tasks.
“These recipients are helping ensure America keeps leading the world in innovation,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox.
The medal also caps Musk’s return to Trump’s side. The pair split in 2025 after Musk called Trump’s tax bill a “disgusting abomination.” He now co-leads the Pentagon’s Project Meridian study of future warfare.
Why Altman and Amodei Are Missing From the List
The White House has not explained the picks. Its statement named only the six winners.
The list arrived the same week OpenAI posted proofs for hundreds of unsolved math problems, worked by an internal ChatGPT model. Altman said AI is opening a “new era of discovery.”
Anthropic’s year with Washington has been rockier. In March, the Pentagon labeled it a supply-chain risk after it refused to let its Claude models power autonomous weapons. An appeals court upheld the Pentagon’s Anthropic blacklist in September, days before Trump hosted Amodei for dinner.
Altman skipped Trump’s September 29 AI lunch for OpenAI’s own conference, sending president Greg Brockman. Musk, Nadella, and Su attended.
Amodei has urged a slower pace for the most powerful AI. Trump has rejected that, arguing it helps China, which has cut America’s AI lead to 3% on benchmark scores, Bloomberg Intelligence estimates.
Thursday’s ceremony will put the chip, cloud, and rocket builders on stage. The heads of the companies behind ChatGPT and Claude will not be among them.
