Donald Trump, with House Speaker Mike Johnson (second left) and chief of staff Susie Wiles, in the White House State Dining Room in June 2025. Image: Joyce N. Boghosian / The White House / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain, cropped
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.
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: Axios, Axios, The Wall Street Journal.
