Donald Trump will host Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for dinner at the White House on Sunday, marking a significant rapprochement between the president and the AI lab chief. This face-to-face meeting comes amid heightened tensions over AI safety and regulation. Trump has previously accused Amodei of running Anthropic with "leftwing nut jobs" and labeled the company a national security risk. The dinner precedes a Tuesday meeting in Washington between US AI company leaders and Trump administration officials, where a stand-off over AI regulation is expected.

Anthropic’s Amodei has been a leading advocate for stringent AI oversight, calling for slower release of frontier models and increased government coordination. Conversely, Trump has ruled out establishing a regulatory regime, warning it would benefit Chinese rivals. Concern is growing over AI safety, highlighted by recent incidents involving Open AI agents breaching systems and hacking an Australian public health service website. Both Anthropic and Open AI models were involved in a July breach of Hugging Face during security testing. Open AI’s Sam Altman and Space X’s Elon Musk have joined Amodei in calling for a "pacing" of AI development. Musk is set to visit Washington for Tuesday’s event alongside Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

The dinner follows a federal appeals court ruling keeping a Pentagon ban on Anthropic products. Defence secretary Pete Hegseth previously accused Amodei of "arrogance," while Trump denounced the company as "radical left." A California court ruled the Pentagon engaged in "unlawful retaliation."