Anthropic's Amodei dines with Trump amid AI policy clash
What's the deal? AnthropicDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → CEO Dario AmodeiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → had a private dinner with President Donald Trump late Sunday night, the president confirmed, per CBS News (first reported by Axios). The White House has not released details of what was discussed, though Trump said beforehand the two would "talk about" AI regulation.
Why now? Amodei has been warning about the "exponential growth" of AI and pushing for industry safeguards, while Trump has resisted regulation, framing it as a US-China race: "I'm for let's go and let's win. You know we're about a year, maybe a year and a half up on China. There is nobody in third place. I mean it's just us and China." The dinner follows Trump and Xi Jinping's agreement last week to set up an AI safety channel between the two countries, and comes two days before a White House "golden age" luncheon with tech executives, which Amodei is expected to attend.
The friction: Anthropic and the Trump administration have had a rocky relationship — the Pentagon earlier this year declared the company a "supply chain risk" after Anthropic said its technology shouldn't be used for mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weapons, a designation a judge upheld earlier this month. Trump has previously called Anthropic's leaders "leftwing nut jobs," and unlike most tech CEOs who have courted the administration, Amodei had largely kept his distance until now.
The signal: As governments race to set the terms for AI, face time between top developers and heads of state is becoming part of the industry's playbook — a sign of how tightly commercial ambition and policy are now intertwined, even between historically adversarial counterparts.
Read more: CBS News · TechCrunch
Image credit: RyanDonegan
