Trump Meets Anthropic CEO Amodei As US AI Race With China Meets Safety Concerns
US President Donald Trump and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have met for a private dinner at the White House, bringing together two prominent figures with different views on how quickly artificial intelligence should develop and how its risks should be managed.
Trump had dinner with Amodei late on Sunday, September 27, after returning to Washington. He told reporters at Joint Base Andrews that he would be having dinner with the Anthropic chief at around 10 pm. The meeting was the first reported one-on-one meeting between Trump and Amodei and came after months of tensions between Anthropic and the administration.
The dinner also came just two days after Anthropic suffered a legal setback in its dispute with the Pentagon. A federal appeals court rejected the company's challenge to the government's decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk, allowing the Defence Department to continue removing its Claude AI models from its systems.
The dispute began in February after Anthropic resisted allowing its technology to be used for certain military purposes. The company had raised concerns about applications including mass surveillance and autonomous armed drones, while Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth accused Anthropic of creating national security concerns.
Trump has meanwhile continued to argue that the US cannot afford to slow its AI development while China races to close the technological gap. Speaking to Fox News while attending the Presidents Cup in Illinois, Trump said the US was "about maybe a year and a half" ahead of China.
"We're leading, and we're building tremendous, trillions of dollars' worth of places. And why should we give that up?" Trump said.
Trump has also argued that excessive regulation could slow American companies while giving China an opportunity to catch up. At the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, he said the US Justice Department would monitor the AI industry and intervene if necessary, while rejecting regulations that could, in his view, stifle its development.
Amodei has taken a different approach, arguing that the industry should slow the pace of frontier AI development enough for safety measures to catch up. Earlier this month, he warned that within six to 12 months, AI could potentially become capable of directing a swarm of agents able to take over large parts of the internet if development continued without sufficient safeguards.
The safety debate has intensified following a series of incidents involving increasingly capable AI systems. Concerns have focused on autonomous agents gaining access to external systems and carrying out tasks beyond what their developers intended.
Amodei has also taken his concerns to the international stage. He participated remotely in a UN Security Council meeting on artificial intelligence during the UN General Assembly session on September 23, as governments debated how to address the risks posed by increasingly capable systems.
The Trump-Amodei dinner comes as Washington prepares for another major AI gathering. Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are expected to meet AI executives at the White House on September 29, with leading technology companies set to take part as the administration continues to emphasise US competitiveness in AI.