CEOs of the biggest companies in the artificial intelligence space were lunching with President Trump on Tuesday, a day after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei separately met with Trump alone.
The president has sounded cluelessly bullish about the AI industry in recent weeks, notably pushing back on calls for regulation — likely because in his black-and-white universe, regulation is bad, making money is good. Meanwhile, AI CEOs themselves have practically been begging for global cooperation around some sort of guardrails, as they themselves have seen the potential harms that could come from powerful AI models.
Last week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman both spoke to the UN Security Council about the need for a global rulebook and international coordination in order to harness the power of AI. And this came two weeks after Amodei penned a 3,800-word essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," calling for an industry-wide slowdown in the pace of AI development. As he put it, AI clearly brings risks to humanity, and, "A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute."
Trump soon responded via tweet calling such concerns a "hoax," and a "SICK conspiracy," and essentially saying the industry can't slow down if it wants to maintain an edge over China.
Fast-forward to Monday night, and Amodei was having a private dinner at the White House with President Trump. Lord knows this was probably more of a kissing-the-ring situation than any deep policy discussion. And it comes months after the Pentagon declared Amodei's company a "supply chain risk" in order to cancel a contract they had for using Claude — which followed Anthropic pushing back on the Pentagon wanting the freedom to use the technology be used for mass surveillance of Americans, or to power fully autonomous weapons.
A federal appeals court on Friday just upheld the Pentagon's right to blacklist the company, in a significant loss for Anthropic as far as future lucrative government contracts are concerned.
Tuesday's luncheon at the White House included House Speaker Mike Johnson, VP JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Amodei, Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su, Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, and billionaire former AI and crypto czar David Sacks. The only major Silicon Valley tech CEO not invited, apparently, was new Apple CEO John Ternus.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House Tuesday afternoon, Trump crowed that he had signed a "morally binding" document with the CEOs about "self-regulation" of AI models.
"There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation, and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that," Trump said. He added that tech leaders "want to see communities that are safe and happy, and they’re going to make communities very, very happy. Otherwise, they’ll be forced to go overseas or other locations."
Trump also said he would be appointing a new "AI czar" in a few days.
Su spoke to CNBC after the event, saying she was "very encouraged" by the discussion, and saying that there was "a lot of optimism and a sense of responsibility" in the room.
Prior to the event, Palantir's Karp told CNBC, "The main issue that you have and I have is we have to take responsibility for the dangers we’re aware of. All of us do. And by the way, American people don’t want separate rules for tech people and for themselves."
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Reuters reported on some of the details from Anthropic's IPO filing — which it appears to be pushing forward with despite Amodei's essay, and despite competitor OpenAI saying it was pausing its own IPO effort this year.
And that may be because they really need the cash! Per the report, Anthropic had a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, on revenue of $4.6 billion. The company expects to have $518 billion in future obligations for cloud computing and other infrastructure, and it is currently spending more than half of its expenses on computing costs — about $7 billion of its $12.65 billion in 2025 expenses.
Anthropic could be looking at a valuation around $2 trillion after the IPO, which would be more than double what the company was valued at in its last financing around in May, which was $965 billion.
Previously: Anthropic CEO Calls for AI Slowdown Amid Escalating Worries
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