Trump in private dinner with Anthropic chief Dario Amodei: first face-to-face meeting after a year of clashes over AI

U.S. President Donald Trump and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are expected to have a private dinner Sunday evening at the White House, as Wall Street Journal reports. According to sources at the American daily, this will be the first face-to-face meeting between the two men; the news was first reported by Axios.

The Trump administration has been openly critical of Anthropic and its push for greater oversight of artificial intelligence models. The dinner comes just weeks after Amodei called on leading American AI companies to slow the pace of new model development, a stance that has put him openly at odds with the White House.

Relations between the sides have become markedly strained in recent months. The Pentagon declared the company a “security risk” in February, a designation upheld by an appeals court only on Friday. Earlier, in June, the White House forced the startup to shut off access to two of its models for two and a half weeks, over national security concerns.

It is also interesting that Amodei was the only leading figure in the AI industry not invited to Thursday’s state dinner with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, attended by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai. According to Wall Street Journal, his absence left Anthropic isolated from its biggest rivals.

Just last week, Altman and Amodei testified before the UN General Assembly calling for international standards for the safe development of AI, while Trump in his speech before the world body said the United States “fully rejects” efforts toward a global regulatory framework for artificial intelligence. A White House official reiterated that the U.S. must remain the “leading AI superpower,” leaving open the question of what will be discussed around tonight’s dinner table.