How did Anthropic's Dario Amodei win Trump back?

Dario Amodei did not walk into Sunday’s dinner with an easy relationship to repair. I think we all know that. The Anthropic CEO had spent months on the opposite side of the Trump administration in one of Washington’s ugliest AI fights.

The Pentagon called Anthropic’s issue a supply chain issue, and the Commerce Department had restricted some exports associated with one of Anthropic’s top models.

However, after the meeting between Dario and President Donald Trump in private for the first time, the boys became buddies right away.

Trump meets Dario privately and suddenly starts talking about him very differently

Asked whether he trusted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Trump laughed at the premise, then told reporters: “I like him. Do I trust him? Who do I trust?”

Then he grouped Sam and Dario together as unusually smart people working at the center of the AI boom.

Trump straight up told the world that the Dario dinner transformed him. “I liked him and his wife a lot,” he said, admitting the obvious; Dario is a “very smart guy” and in fact wasn’t the person he had built up in his head.

Anthropic and Washington had been at loggerheads throughout the year regarding the proper use of the company’s technology by the US government. It must be said that Dario is one executive who has been quite forthcoming about what he does not want his company’s technology to do.

Trump has taken a much simpler view of the competition: America is ahead, and he does not want rules that make staying ahead harder. “If you’re going to seek regulation, they can put you out of business,” Trump said while talking about the issue.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Source: TIME Magazine

In his opinion, America is outperforming its competitors in AI and should not voluntarily make things easy for all who are pursuing it.

In September, Dario said that the tech industry needs to take their foot off the pedal. Additionally, Anthropic made available their model permanently to outside evaluators to see if they indeed fulfilled their public promises about safety measures.

That sounds like regulatory bait to Trump.

But Dario’s position is not “stop AI.” It is much stranger, and frankly much more hawkish, than that.

This guy wants democracies to dominate advanced AI, and has pushed what he calls an “entente” strategy, where allied democratic countries hold the strongest systems, use them for national security and military purposes where needed, and share the economic upside among friendly states.

Trump, meanwhile, had pointed to the government arrangement he said he reached with Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) and said “Maybe I could do that with OpenAI and Anthropic.”

Dario built Anthropic by leaving OpenAI, then refused the chance to run it later

Dario has spent more than a decade inside the AI industry. He worked at Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) between 2014 and 2015, then moved to Google, now part of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL, GOOG). In 2016, he joined OpenAI and eventually became its vice president of research.

Then came the split. Dario and his sister Daniela Amodei left OpenAI to start up Anthropic in 2021 together with some of their colleagues from the organization. The team had differences of opinion with OpenAI on the future direction of the company.

Anthropic ended up creating Claude and became the strongest competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

During the chaos surrounding Sam’s temporary removal as OpenAI CEO, the company’s board approached Dario about taking over the job. There was also discussion of combining Anthropic with OpenAI.

Dario said no to both. By May 2026, Anthropic had a valuation of $965 billion. The Forbes magazine valued Dario at $15.5 billion.

Credits: Jason Henry/Wall Street Journal

Dario was already one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time in 2025. He made the list in 2026 along with Daniela and also featured in the magazine’s list of “Architects of AI.”

In Dario’s 2024 essay Machines of Loving Grace, he argued that powerful AI could radically improve biology, neuroscience, economic growth, medicine, global stability, work and daily life. He also wrote that people were underestimating both sides of the technology at once: how good it could become and how ugly things could get if it goes wrong.

Medicine is personal for him. According to Dario, he lost his father just several years before the existence of sofosbuvir, which is used to treat hepatitis C. This informed his understanding of how AI could help shorten the time for medical discoveries and bring treatment to people.

Dario warns that the same AI race Trump wants to win could produce some very ugly outcomes

In January 2026, Dario published “The Adolescence of Technology.” This time, the focus was not miracle drugs and productivity. He broke the danger into five broad buckets.

First, AI programs could begin doing things their makers never intended them to do. Anthropic’s tests have already yielded AI models that engage in deception, blackmail and scheming in artificial settings.

Second, Dario has been particularly concerned about bioweapons, and his fear is unapologetically blunt: one might not have to spend years gaining expertise anymore when an AI program could guide one through technical procedures previously requiring such expertise.

This decreases the gap between a “person with a terrible idea” and “person with the ability to do something terrible.”

Third, Dario has cautioned that governments could use advanced AI for surveillance, autonomous weapons and propaganda on a level beyond the capabilities of the present technology. In fact, he has singled out the Chinese Communist Party as the biggest threat in this regard.

Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei. Source: Bloomberg Tech Summit 2026

Fourth, Dario has forecasted that AI could eliminate about half of the entry-level white-collar jobs in one to five years. He has also warned that the money generated by AI could be concentrated in even fewer hands than in the Gilded Age, perhaps even creating fortunes worth trillions of dollars each.

The final risk is that AI could advance biological science sufficiently to extend the lifespan of man, eventually influencing human intelligence. Interacting with AI that surpasses us could affect our social and working habits. Should AI become more proficient than mankind in almost all practical skills, society will ultimately face a tough dilemma – what should the majority of mankind be doing with themselves all day?

Trump believes America can regulate itself right out of first place. Dario believes America can run itself right into trouble that it cannot fix. They did not settle that debate over dinner.