President Trump will host Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for a private White House dinner Sunday, rejecting calls to slow AI while China races to catch up.
President Donald Trump confirmed he will meet Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for a private dinner at the White House on Sunday evening, telling Fox News he wants the United States to win the artificial intelligence contest with China, not ease off the pace.
Amodei has spent recent weeks urging slower advances in AI model capabilities and pressing for tighter international management of the technology. Trump answered that pitch with a clear priority: keep the American lead.
The dinner lands in a busy stretch of White House tech diplomacy, a Pentagon fight with Anthropic over procurement risk, and open disagreement inside the AI industry over how fast the frontier should move.
Trump made his position plain when asked about Amodei’s call to slow capability gains. He framed the choice as competition, not caution for its own sake.
Trump told Fox News’ Aishah Hasnie:
"We're going to talk about it. I'm for let's go and let's win. We're about a year, maybe a year and a half up on China. There is nobody in third place. It's just us and China. We're leading by quite a bit. I spoke a little bit about it with President Xi. Not too much, it wasn't a topic of conversation. Because I think if you, as they say, open it up to China, you give up the lead. But I'll be speaking to Dario and others,"
Reuters reported Trump repeating that the United States is roughly a year and a half ahead, arguing the country is building “trillions of dollars’ worth of places” and asking why that edge should be surrendered. On fears of rogue AI agents, he said, “I don’t worry about it.”
That stance sets the table for Sunday’s private dinner. Amodei arrives as a CEO who has publicly warned that the industry is moving too fast. Trump arrives as a president who treats the China gap as the central fact of the race.
Amodei raised fresh concerns this month about AI risk and argued the pace of capability improvements needs to come down. In an essay, he put the case in direct terms.
Amodei wrote:
"We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,"
Last week he carried a similar message to the U.N. Security Council, calling for international standards and cooperation to manage threats from rapid AI development. The appeal sits far from Trump’s “let’s go and let’s win” line.
Amodei was not among the tech leaders at Thursday’s White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg were there. The Anthropic chief’s absence put another quiet marker on the week’s guest list.
Trump said the Amodei dinner is not the only stop on the calendar. A broader White House session is set for Tuesday with House Speaker Mike Johnson and AI executives.
Trump described it this way:
"We have a very big meeting on Tuesday where everybody's coming in and that'll be very important,"
Sunday’s private meal with Amodei therefore sits inside a short window of direct presidential engagement with the industry, first one-on-one, then a larger group with congressional leadership in the room.
While the dinner plans moved forward, Anthropic’s fight with the Defense Department stayed live. The company has been locked in a legal battle over the Pentagon’s decision to treat it as a “supply chain risk” for procurement.
On Friday, an appeals court ruled 2-1 for the Pentagon. The decision lets the department keep the designation in place for Defense Department buying. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth answered the ruling on social media.
Hegseth posted:
"Confirmed: @AnthropicAI = Supply Chain Risk. The @DeptofWar does what is right for the Country and our Warriors,"
That ruling does not cancel Sunday’s dinner. It does show how national-security scrutiny and White House access can run on parallel tracks at the same time.
Pressure is also coming from inside the labs. Earlier this month, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon stepped down and released a resignation statement dated Sept. 8.
Coxon said:
"I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,"
His charge lands on both major U.S. AI developers. It also lands in the same news cycle as Amodei’s slowdown appeal and Trump’s insistence on keeping the lead over Beijing.
For readers tracking the policy fight, the sequence is straightforward. Amodei warns and writes. A researcher walks out. The Pentagon wins a court round on supply-chain risk. Trump books the dinner, rejects a go-slow posture, and points to a larger Tuesday meeting with Speaker Johnson and industry leaders.
American AI leadership is not a slogan contest. It is a race with a near peer that does not pause for Western second thoughts. Trump is treating the White House table as a place to press that reality, not to adopt it as optional.
