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Trump calls Amodei "very highly respected" hours before their White House dinner

Two days earlier, a court let the Pentagon keep calling Anthropic a supply chain risk.

By Think Facility · September 28, 2026 · Anthropic AI policy

On Sunday, September 27, 2026, Donald Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews that he was having dinner that night with Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic. He said it was at ten o'clock and called Amodei "very highly respected." (He also said, more than once, that these were long days.)

The White House posted the video of that gaggle without a transcript, so everything here comes from the recording. It's short. Trump brings the dinner up, comes back to it, then talks about his meeting with Xi Jinping instead. The part about Amodei takes well under a minute. He didn't say who else would be at the table, or whether the two had met before.

Where the two stood a week ago

The warm words are new. On September 20 Trump called the push to slow AI a hoax, days after Amodei published his case for pacing the frontier.

Then there's the Pentagon. On September 25 Anthropic lost its appeal against being labeled a supply chain risk, the designation that shuts it out of defense work. Trump didn't bring that up at Andrews, and nobody asked.

Said by

President Trump

Where he said it

Joint Base Andrews

When

Sep. 27, 2026

What Anthropic has said

Nothing, so far. On the morning of September 28 there was no word about the dinner on Anthropic's newsroom or on Amodei's own site. Neither man has said in public that it went ahead or what was discussed (press reports that it did cite people who weren't named), so this brief stops at what Trump said beforehand.

Trump gave no agenda for the dinner at any point in the video.