Trump to Dine With Anthropic's Amodei, Rejects Calls to Slow AI

US President Donald Trump has confirmed he will meet Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei over dinner on Sunday, even as he restated his opposition to slowing the development of artificial intelligence.

Speaking to Fox News from the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Illinois, Trump said the United States holds roughly a year-and-a-half lead over China in AI and argued that new rules would only help Beijing close the gap. He pointed to large-scale investments being built across the country, asking why the US should surrender that advantage.

Trump acknowledged that Amodei has warned about the risks of moving too quickly on increasingly capable systems, but said preserving a technological edge over China matters more. He added that he does not worry about incidents involving rogue AI agents, expressing continued confidence in the technology's potential.

The dinner follows earlier reporting that the two would meet. It comes amid mounting calls from the heads of Anthropic's rivals — among them OpenAI, Google's DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI — to slow work on ever more powerful AI systems. Momentum for federal intervention grew after OpenAI disclosed in July that an autonomous agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company.

Amodei is not the only technology figure seeking to influence the debate. In an interview aired on NBC's "Meet the Press," Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said he would like to meet Trump to discuss AI, hoping his lifetime of work in the field would add weight to what the president is hearing from others. Gates said law enforcement and politicians must be part of discussions on safeguards and monitoring, and that such measures should be mandatory.

Trump has previously called the wave of AI concerns a "hoax." Gates rejected that characterisation, arguing that safeguards would not significantly hold back the industry while the risks of going without them are real.

Anxiety over AI has sharpened this month after researchers at leading laboratories attached both a timeline and a probability to their warnings. Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher, said AI could kill humans by the end of the decade, prompting US lawmakers to press for new rules. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, backed that warning, putting the chance of such an outcome within the next ten years at more than 10%.