Anthropic’s chief executive visits the White House after calling to slow AI development, ahead of wider industry talks planned for Tuesday.
President Donald Trump and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are meeting for a private dinner at the White House on Sunday evening, Trump confirmed to Fox News.
The dinner, first reported by Axios, is the pair’s first one-on-one meeting. Trump confirmed it while attending the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Illinois.
The meeting comes after Amodei argued that AI advancement should be slowed down. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Amodei wrote in an essay this month. Last week, he addressed the U.N. Security Council on establishing international standards to manage threats from rapid AI growth. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon also stepped down on Sept. 8, stating: “I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,”
Asked by Fox News reporter Aishah Hasnie about Amodei’s call to slow down, Trump emphasized competition with China. “We’re going to talk about it. I’m for let’s go and let’s win. We’re about a year, maybe a year and a half up on China. There is nobody in third place. It’s just us and China. We’re leading by quite a bit. I spoke a little bit about it with President Xi. Not too much, it wasn’t a topic of conversation. Because I think if you, as they say, open it up to China, you give up the lead. But I’ll be speaking to Dario and others,” Trump said.
Amodei didn’t attend Thursday’s White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping, which included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Anthropic has also been in a legal fight with the Pentagon. On Friday, an appeals court ruled 2-1 to let the Defense Department continue designating Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” for procurement purposes. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth posted afterward on social media: “Confirmed: @AnthropicAI = Supply Chain Risk. The @DeptofWar does what is right for the Country and our Warriors,”
The administration moved against the company after Anthropic refused in February to allow its tools to be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance, and the designation bars the U.S. military from using its models. Trump has also mocked Amodei as trying to be “a perfect little angel” over his call to slow AI development.
Trump said a broader White House meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson and AI executives is set for Tuesday. “We have a very big meeting on Tuesday where everybody’s coming in and that’ll be very important,” Trump told Hasnie.
