Anthropic CEO Amodei To Meet Trump As AI Safety Fears Rise

Their dinner would mark the first private sit-down between Amodei and Trump after months of rocky relations between the Anthropic chief and the administration. Tensions erupted during a bitter contract dispute with the Pentagon early this year and deepened when the Commerce Department briefly imposed export controls on Anthropic's breakthrough Mythos model in June.

Trump said Sunday he plans to discuss Amodei's recent calls for slowing down the development pace of new AI models. "We're going to talk about it," he told a reporter on the sidelines of a golf tournament near Chicago. "I'm for, 'Let's go and let's win.'"

Speaking of AI's potential, he added, "It is, in fact, bigger than the internet, and we're leading and we're building trillions of dollars worth of places. And why should we give that up?"

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The dinner was also confirmed by people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe confidential planning. Axios reported earlier on the dinner. Spokespeople for Anthropic and the White House didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

The meeting is set to take place against a backdrop of growing global anxiety over AI safety following a series of high-profile security breaches carried out by cutting-edge models, including disclosures by OpenAI last week that its models had hacked an Australian government website earlier this year. Those episodes have fueled calls for new AI standards from US lawmakers and many across the tech industry.

Amodei and Trump have staked out starkly different positions about the threats posed by AI. The Anthropic chief brought the safety debate to the mainstream with an essay on Sept. 12 warning of AI's existential risks and urging more regulation of the technology. He also promised to slow development of the most advanced models, a pledge that was embraced by his rivals, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI founder Elon Musk.

Trump, on the other hand, has belittled those doomsday fears as "a hoax" and rejected calls for more international coordination on AI as "a globalist conspiracy." Following Amodei's essay, Trump launched a string of social media posts opposing any slowdown in AI development - one of which named the Anthropic chief directly - a disagreement that significantly raises the stakes of the Sunday dinner.

Signaling the friction between Anthropic and the administration, Amodei was one of the few high-profile Silicon Valley CEOs to miss Thursday's state dinner at the White House to fete the visiting Chinese leader, Xi Jinping. Those in attendance included Altman and Musk, as well as Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang, whose company's chips have helped power the AI industry's growth.

The dinner between Amodei and Trump is also set to take place days before Trump welcomes Musk and Huang back to Washington for an event to herald the launch of a new AI-powered government website. Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown, who has served as a point person for the company in negotiations with the Pentagon and Commerce Department, is also among the executives set to attend the Tuesday ribbon-cutting.

Also Tuesday, Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are set to host a separate gathering of AI CEOs. In recent weeks, US lawmakers have increasingly expressed their concerns about the safety of AI models and unveiled measures that include required testing of new systems and more disclosure about risks.

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The groundswell for more safety guardrails has faced pushback from Trump and his top aides, who have insisted that they would oppose any moves that would slow development of AI. Trump has made the technology central to his economic agenda and insisted that the US maintain its lead over China. In lieu of new rules, the president and his advisers have said that companies should be held individually responsible for the tech they release.