The Briefing
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had a late dinner with President Donald Trump on Sunday and met Senate Majority Leader John Thune at the Capitol on Monday night, without commenting publicly on either.
- Thune said Anthropic looked over a bill and sent back feedback, but he did not name the measure or say what the company wanted changed.
- Roughly three in four Americans, 73% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll, say AI companies are not doing enough to head off serious harm, as Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson host AI executives at the White House on Tuesday.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, spent Sunday night at a private White House dinner with President Donald Trump and Monday night at the Capitol with Senate Majority Leader John Thune. He offered no public account of either meeting, and walked past reporters who pressed him on Monday.
The back-to-back meetings lead into a lunch on Tuesday. Trump and Johnson will receive AI executives in the East Room at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, according to CBS News, while Congress debates how much oversight to place on an industry the president would rather leave alone.
Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews, after returning from the Presidents Cup in Illinois, that he would sit down for a 10 p.m. dinner with the head of Anthropic. The White House has released no details of what the two men discussed.
After the Capitol meeting, Thune described the conversation as "productive" and said Anthropic wants to contribute constructively while the Senate searches for a legislative route. He framed the debate around competition with China, saying Congress should keep the country ahead without letting safety slip.
The bill nobody named
The most striking detail is that Anthropic has already studied a piece of legislation and returned comments. Thune did not say which bill it was or what the company asked for, and none of the coverage reviewed for this article spells out those requests. The gap invites speculation about lobbying, but the reporting does not support conclusions about its content.
Amodei has cautioned that the technology is compounding at a runaway pace and has asked for safeguards, which Trump has rejected. The president has said the contest with China comes down to one thing: "whoever wins AI wins."
Before the dinner, Trump put the U.S. lead over China at roughly a year to a year and a half and said no country sits in third place. He has also dismissed fears about AI threatening humanity as a "hoax."
The Pentagon backdrop
Tension between Anthropic and the administration predates this week. The Defense Department named Anthropic a supply chain risk in March, a label that keeps the military and its contractors from using the company's Claude models.
On Friday, Sept. 25, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the designation in a 2-1 decision. Anthropic said it disagrees, is weighing further review, and pointed to a separate federal ruling that found a parallel designation unlawful.
Who is expected at the White House lunch
CBS News reports that Amodei is expected at the meeting, based on a source familiar with his plans. Spokespeople for OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Google's Sundar Pichai and Palantir's Alex Karp said those executives will attend, and sources placed Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia's Jensen Huang there as well, the network said.
Johnson has said the aim is to find a balance between encouraging innovation and providing oversight, Reuters reported. Thune will skip the lunch but said the Senate expects to host some of the same executives later this week, per CBS.
The current federal approach rests on a June executive order. Developers are invited, not required, to hand their most advanced systems to federal reviewers as much as a month ahead of any rollout to trusted partners.
Public opinion points the other way
A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1,277 U.S. adults, fielded Sept. 17 to 20 with a margin of error of 3 percentage points, found that 73% worry the industry is falling short on guarding against serious societal damage. A 55% majority also favored putting the brakes on development. Those views sit at odds with the president's stance.
