President Donald Trump hosted Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei for a private dinner at the White House on Sunday evening, the first one-on-one meeting between the two men, according to TechCrunch and Al Jazeera.
The dinner came two days after a federal appeals court upheld the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a "supply chain risk," a classification that bars the U.S. military from using the company's models, Al Jazeera reported. Anthropic drew the designation after refusing in February to let the Defense Department use its tools for autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance, according to Al Jazeera.
Trump defended his administration's approach to AI development at the dinner. "We're about maybe a year and a half up on China. We're leading, and we're building tremendous, trillions of dollars' worth of places. And why should we give that up?" he said, according to Al Jazeera. Trump characterized Amodei's calls to slow AI development as an attempt to play "a perfect little angel," Al Jazeera reported.
Amodei skipped a state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping days earlier, an event OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman attended, according to Al Jazeera. Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are scheduled to meet with a broader group of AI executives Tuesday, TechCrunch reported.
For a company the Pentagon has formally flagged as a security risk, a private dinner with the president is a signal of where the relationship might be headed. Builders selling AI into government contracts should watch whether the thaw extends past a shared meal.