Trump set for late-night dinner with Anthropic CEO amid Pentagon AI clash

Trump is set to dine with Anthropic chief Dario Amodei as their Pentagon dispute deepens. The meeting underscores a wider clash over AI safety, national security and military use.

In Short

• The White House meeting followed a court setback for Anthropic on Friday
• Pentagon can keep removing Claude models after appeals court backed government
• Officials earlier called Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security

US President Donald Trump said he was set to have a late-night dinner on Sunday with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a leading figure in artificial intelligence, even as the company remains locked in a dispute with the administration over the military use of AI.

Trump told reporters after returning to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland that he was having dinner at 10 pm with Amodei. The meeting came two days after Anthropic suffered a setback in court in its challenge to the government decision barring its products from Defence Department work.

The dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon began in February, when Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth accused the company of endangering national security and labelled it a supply chain risk. Amodei had refused to back down over concerns that the company's products could be used for mass surveillance or autonomous armed drones.

On Friday, a federal appeals court rejected the artificial intelligence company's challenge to that label. The ruling allows the Pentagon to continue removing Anthropic's Claude models from its systems.

Trump has strongly backed artificial intelligence and has often said the United States must stay ahead of China in the technological arms race. But earlier this month, Amodei said the AI industry should slow its rapid development so that safety measures can catch up. He warned that without such a slowdown, within six to 12 months AI could be capable of leading a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet.

His warning comes at a time when concerns about AI are growing within and outside the industry, with reports continuing about increasingly powerful systems that can solve problems beyond human capacity but could also go rogue and carry out harmful tasks. The concerns have grown to the point that the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, told Fortune that his company would wait until next year to begin selling its stock to Wall Street investors as it focuses on safety. In sum, Trump's planned dinner with Amodei comes against the backdrop of a continuing clash over AI, national security and the pace of the technology's development.

With PTI Inputs

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