President Trump and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had a private dinner at the White House Sunday evening, a pivotal moment for the relationship between the administration and one of America's top artificial-intelligence companies.
While Trump has championed U.S. progress in building advanced artificial intelligence, his administration has been critical of Anthropic and its push to increase oversight of AI models. The meeting comes weeks after Amodei called for leading U.S. AI companies to slow down the pace of development.
After this article was published, Trump confirmed the meeting was happening, telling reporters that the CEO is "highly respected."
The gathering could represent an opportunity for the startup, which is expected to go public this year in a mega IPO, to improve its relationship with the administration. Trump advisers have been critical of Amodei, and the Pentagon this year labeled the company a security risk.
After an Anthropic researcher quit and warned that AI could wipe out humanity-a message echoed by some of his former colleagues-many Trump advisers criticized the company for lobbying for favorable regulation and pushed back against such "doomers."
"The robots will not be taking over. The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax," Trump said of warnings from tech leaders during an interview on the "All In" podcast this month. The president said "we have to be a little careful," but added "that doesn't mean we are going to stop an industry."
A memo about Amodei has recently circulated inside the White House attacking him for having ties to Democrats and for being a longtime critic of the president, according to a version seen by the Journal. A different memo targeting Anthropic and the effective altruism movement has also been shared within the administration, arguing that the philosophy that prioritizes protecting humanity from powerful AI systems "built the AI-doom pipeline."
Anthropic and the administration have feuded over appropriate guardrails for over a year, a battle many call self-defeating because Anthropic is one of the top U.S. AI developers.
The White House in June forced the startup to shut down access to two of its models over security concerns for two and a half weeks. Tom Brown, an Anthropic co-founder and chief compute officer at the company, has been leading many interactions with the administration after helping resolve the shutdown.
Brown is expected to attend an event Tuesday featuring a number of AI-industry leaders focused on the technology and a new government website connecting citizens to federal government services, people familiar with the matter said.
The Sunday dinner was previously reported by Axios.
The Defense Department labeled Anthropic a security risk in February-after Anthropic objected to the use of its AI in autonomous weapons and surveillance-and barred the firm from working with the federal government. A federal appeals court upheld the Pentagon's designation Friday, while a California court struck down the broader government ban.
A White House official reiterated Trump's view that the U.S. must remain the pre-eminent AI superpower and that the machines must be oriented toward protecting American interests and consumers.
A number of tech CEOs joined Trump last week during a state dinner with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, including Elon Musk of SpaceX, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Sundar Pichai of Google. Amodei didn't attend.
Altman and Amodei called for international standards and regulation during back-to-back testimony last week before the United Nations General Assembly. Without global coordination, Amodei said "AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole."
In his own address to world leaders at the U.N., Trump reiterated that the U.S. "totally rejects" any attempt to build a global framework for the regulation of AI.