First one-on-one between Dario Amodei and Donald Trump, as the Pentagon classifies Anthropic as a risk

The Anthropic executive dined at the White House on September 27, the first face-to-face meeting with a president who calls safety concerns a "Democratic hoax."

Dario Amodei dined at the White House on the evening of September 27 with Donald Trump. This is the first time that the two men have met alone, after months of remote public exchanges on the trajectory that the development of AI should follow in the United States.

The positions are difficult to reconcile. The head of Anthropic defends a controlled pace of progress and has formulated a plan that amounts to slowing down certain advances; the president dismisses these concerns by presenting them as a "Democratic hoax" and wants to rename the technology as "superintelligence".

The institutional context is just as tense. The Pentagon has classified Anthropic as a risk to its supply chain, in reaction to the safeguards that the company imposes on the use of its models; the company is challenging the decision in court. Other administration officials have been more accommodating, which makes the meeting all the more scrutinized.