Trump invites Amodei to a private White House dinner

President Trump is hosting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at a private White House dinner on the evening of September 27, their first one-on-one meeting, Axios reported, citing people familiar with the plans. The Wall Street Journal has the same dinner and also calls it the two men’s first face-to-face meeting. It comes two days before Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson meet top AI CEOs at the White House on Tuesday.

The invitation came out of a missed event. At last week’s state dinner, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Google’s Sundar Pichai flanked Trump, but Amodei was absent because of a scheduling conflict. One of Axios’s sources says Trump then invited him personally. The outlet reads the dinner as a sign that relations between Anthropic and an administration whose officials and allies have long clashed with the company are thawing, and calls it an appetizer for Tuesday.

“President Trump has been clear: America will lead the world in Super Intelligence, while protecting American consumers,” a White House official said, adding that the administration will “drive innovation, strengthen American competitiveness, and ensure this transformative technology works for the American people.”

The policy gap is still there. The Journal notes that while Trump has championed U.S. progress on advanced AI, his administration has criticized Anthropic’s push for more oversight of AI models, and that the dinner comes weeks after Amodei called on leading U.S. AI companies to slow the pace of development. That criticism goes back at least to October 2025, when AI and crypto czar David Sacks accused Anthropic of “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.” Amodei answered then that Anthropic is aligned with the administration on “key areas of AI policy.”

The worst of it came on February 27. Talks over the military’s use of Claude had broken down because Anthropic wanted to keep safeguards against fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. That day Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed Anthropic a “supply chain risk to national security,” and Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic “immediately,” with the Defense Department and some other agencies given up to six months to transition, CBS News reported. Amodei called the moves “retaliatory and punitive.” Anthropic took the designation to court, and a D.C. Circuit majority has since rejected its challenge to the exclusion.

Earlier attempts at a thaw didn’t hold. In April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles met Amodei, and the White House described it as an “introductory meeting” that was “productive and constructive,” TechCrunch reported. By Axios’s account, the relationship has been on shaky ground all year, and each sign of warming soon gave way to new friction.

The personal side is the other risk. Saturday Night Live’s latest episode mocked Amodei for his personality and his views on AI safety. Last week, Trump allies sent talking points to the White House about Amodei’s role in the effective altruism movement and its oddities. And months ago, Axios reports, when Anthropic first raised the idea of a one-on-one with Trump, some advised against it because “Dario’s a little too weird” for the president, in the words of one senior official.