White House Holds 'Productive' Meeting With Anthropic Amid Pentagon Feud

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met with senior Trump administration officials at the White House Friday in what the administration described as a "productive and constructive" introductory meeting. The sitdown signals a potential thaw in the frontier AI lab's strained relationship with the White House amid an ongoing dispute with the Pentagon over Anthropic's reluctance to offer certain defense applications. The meeting matters because Anthropic is the primary challenger to OpenAI in frontier reasoning models and the administration's posture toward the company will shape how safety-focused AI firms navigate federal contracts and national-security pressure.