Donald Trump and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Image: The White House (Trump, official portrait); Anthropic (Amodei)
Donald Trump plans to host Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at a private White House dinner on Sunday evening, Axios reports, citing people familiar with the plans. It would be the pair’s first one-on-one meeting, and Trump personally invited him.
Axios calls it a sign that relations are thawing between the White House and the AI company, which has spent much of the year fighting the administration in public and in court.
A late invitation
The biggest names in AI, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, were at Thursday’s state dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Amodei wasn’t: he had a scheduling conflict, according to Axios, and Trump invited him to dinner afterwards.
It comes two days before Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are due to meet the heads of the top AI companies at the White House on Tuesday, a meeting Johnson has said will cover the companies’ responsibility to keep AI safe.
“A little too weird”
It’s a sharp turn. Only this week, Axios reported that a memo circulating among Trump allies cast Amodei as the face of AI “doomerism”. It described effective altruism, the movement Anthropic’s founders grew out of, as “a fringe, cultish collective out of touch with mainstream America” that “built the AI-doom pipeline.”
“Amodei is the embodiment of an ideology and globalist approach to innovation that’s counter to the president’s America First agenda,” an administration source told Axios. When Anthropic asked months ago about setting up a meeting with the president, White House officials advised against it because “Dario’s a little too weird” for Trump, a senior official said.
The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that some of Anthropic’s earliest employees are considering buying remote land to move to if AI goes wrong, and that the anti-EA memo has been circulating inside the White House itself.
A year of fighting
The feud goes well beyond words. The Pentagon labelled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” after contract talks over how its AI could be used broke down, and on Friday an appeals court said the Pentagon can keep it on that blacklist. Trump, meanwhile, has called AI safety a “hoax”, the cause Amodei has built his company around.
The timing matters for Anthropic too. It is preparing a stock market listing as soon as November, and a truce with the White House, or at least a seat at the table, would remove one of its biggest risks.
Update: Trump says “I don’t worry about it”
Hours before the dinner, Trump confirmed the meeting but made clear he isn’t about to slow down, Reuters reports. Speaking to Fox News at the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Illinois, he acknowledged Amodei’s worry that moving too fast on AI raises the risks, but said staying ahead of China matters more: “We’re about maybe a year and a half up on China. We’re leading, and we’re building tremendous, trillions of dollars’ worth of places. And why should we give that up?”
Asked about the recent reports of AI agents misbehaving, Trump said: “I don’t worry about it.”
The dinner went ahead at the White House on Sunday night, Forbes reports. Neither the White House nor Anthropic has yet said what was discussed.
Update: a memo attacking Amodei did the rounds first
Before the dinner, Amodei’s critics sent the president a memo attacking him, Fortune reports, citing The Wall Street Journal and Axios. According to Axios, the memo said Amodei had “a long record of attacking Trump” and “deep Democratic ties,” and that “he doesn’t trust President Trump.” The dinner went ahead anyway, the Associated Press reports, with Trump saying he would meet Amodei at 10pm on Sunday after flying back into Joint Base Andrews. There is still no word from either side on what was discussed.
Update: the lunch ended with a “morally binding” pact
Amodei was among the executives at Tuesday’s White House lunch, alongside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman. Afterwards Trump said they had signed a voluntary agreement to police themselves that he called “morally binding”, while ruling out new AI laws. Here’s what they agreed. Neither side has said anything more about Sunday’s dinner.
Update: Trump says they talked for more than two hours
Trump has now given his own account of the dinner. In an interview with TIME on Monday, published on Wednesday, he said Amodei arrived at about 10pm, after Trump’s helicopter landed late from the Presidents Cup, and that they “stayed for more than two hours, talked about a lot of things.” Asked whether he still disagreed with Amodei on AI safety, he said Amodei’s views were “much different, I think, than what is portrayed in the media”, and added: “I liked him and his wife a lot.”
Very smart guy. Maybe different than I thought, a little bit.
Donald Trump, to TIME
In the same interview Trump said he “might” take a stake in OpenAI and Anthropic. Here’s everything else he said about AI. Anthropic still hasn’t said what was discussed.
Why it matters
A private dinner won’t lift a Pentagon blacklist on its own, but it is the clearest sign yet that the White House wants Anthropic inside the tent rather than outside it. What comes out of Sunday’s dinner and Tuesday’s meeting could shape how the US regulates the most powerful AI models.
Sources: TIME, Fortune, Newser (AP), Axios, Axios, The Wall Street Journal.
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