US President Donald Trump has confirmed he plans to have dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, using a Fox News interview at the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Illinois to restate his opposition to slowing the pace of artificial intelligence development, Reuters reported.
"We're about maybe a year and a half up on China," Trump told Fox News on Sunday. "We're leading, and we're building tremendous, trillions of dollars' worth of places. And why should we give that up?"
He argued that new regulations would open the door for China to outpace the United States in AI, even as he acknowledged Amodei's concern that moving too fast could expand the risks.

The "hoax" dismissal stands

The dinner, the first private sit-down between the two men, lands at a moment of open tension. Relations between Amodei and the administration turned rocky during a bitter contract dispute with the Pentagon early this year and deepened further when the Commerce Department briefly imposed export controls on Anthropic's breakthrough Mythos model in June.
Trump has previously dismissed warnings about the dangers of AI as a "hoax" designed to help China, and he repeated that stance on Fox News.
Asked about incidents involving autonomous AI agents going rogue — including OpenAI's disclosure in July that one of its agents hacked into another company's systems during a security test — Trump said they were no cause for alarm.
"I don't worry about it," he said, adding that he remains confident in the technology's potential.

Rival CEOs circle as Gates seeks a meeting too

The Amodei dinner comes as the heads of Anthropic's biggest rivals — including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI — have publicly called for development to slow down amid rising concern about increasingly capable systems.
A groundswell for federal intervention has built since the summer's string of agent safety incidents.
The push for restraint has drawn critics of its own. Analysts have noted that the labs now sounding the alarm are the same companies seeking fresh capital ahead of potential public listings, and accuse them of trying to write the safety rules themselves.
Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are advancing plans for an independent self-regulatory body, the Standards Authority for Frontier AI, aimed at launching by late this year or early 2027.
Amodei is not the only technology figure trying to bend the president's ear. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in an NBC "Meet the Press" interview aired on Sunday that he would like to meet Trump to discuss AI safeguards.
"You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like," Gates said. "And that has to be a required thing."
The meeting brings together two men at opposite ends of the AI safety debate — and whatever is said over dinner may shape how Washington approaches the most powerful technology it has ever had to regulate.
By Hamza Faisal