Assuming you’re reading this on Sunday, the President of the United States of America is reportedly having dinner with the President of AI Doomerism right about now. That’s according to an anonymously-sourced Axios story, which says in part that the dinner is “an indication of thawing relations between Anthropic and the administration, whose officials and allies have had longstanding tensions.”
You read that right: Axios says Donald Trump is eating a “one-on-one” meal with the famously twitchy and nervous CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, who doesn’t eat meat except invertebrates, and reportedly tends to “rant” and lacks the ability to “control his emotions.”
How do you suppose it’s going? Do you think Axios is right about that “thawing”?
Anthropic and the Trump Administration have an uneasy relationship. One anonymous Administration official even reportedly called him a “weirdo.” Most recently, Amodei was “notably absent” (to use the New York Post’s phrase) from the President’s state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping—which was attended by leaders from across the tech world. Separately from Trump, Amodei has a tense relationship with China. Axios says Amodei had a scheduling conflict that prevented him from being there.
This uneasy relationship seems to persist—despite the Trump Administration using the company’s Claude AI model in military operations, and in fact finding it nearly impossible to replace—because Amodei infuriated Trump’s Pentagon by raising vague ethical objections earlier this year. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others reportedly called Claude “woke AI” after Amodei insisted there were theoretical limits on what the military could do with it—no autonomous killing, and no mass surveillance.
At the end of February, Anthropic was branded a supply chain risk over the conflict, a designation that means U.S. government contractors aren’t allowed to do business with it. A Federal Appeals Court panel upheld the designation just last week. So there’s plenty for the two to talk about there.
“Help” pic.twitter.com/zsZzPpOZpY
— Emma Gray (@emmaladyrose) November 30, 2016
But Trump’s past dinners with his frienemies sound like some of the strangest eating experiences in history. The awkward photos of Mitt Romney at one such dinner before Trump’s first inauguration will one day hang in the Smithsonian’s exhibit on the Trump era. In an interview with the New Yorker, former FBI director James Comey compared his cursed one-on-one dinner—the one at which Trump demanded loyalty—to a “seduction,” and spoke of an “emptiness” inside the president. Here’s an excerpt (emphasis Gizmodo’s):
“I think he has an emptiness inside of him and a hunger for affirmation I’ve never seen in an adult. (laughing) And I’m not saying that to be funny. I think that he lacks external reference points, and instead of calling, making hard decisions by calling upon a religious tradition or logic or tradition or history, it’s all what will fill this hole.”
And currently, it’s not really going out on a limb to say the President appears to be filling the emptiness with AI—or maybe I should say “SI,” the initialism for Trump’s preferred term, Super Intelligence. Not only is he now using “SI” on official documents, he’s ordering diplomats to say it abroad, and actively seeking to get other heads of state to use it.
But whatever he’s calling it lately, he seems to absolutely love it. A recent frenzy of AI-generated social media posts provoked his former deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews, to worry to the New York Times about his mental acuity. “An 80-year-old president is spending a ridiculous amount of time consuming and reposting endless A.I. fan fiction portraying him as the biggest, strongest and most important person alive. It feels like we’re genuinely watching his brain rot in real time,” Matthews said.
Trump and Amodei, then, are on opposite sides of an important (if arbitrary) cultural boundary: the line between the accelerationists and the doomers.
In Amodei’s now-famous essay from earlier this month titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei, in part, articulated his conviction that the OpenAI Hugging Face incident, the legendary AI safety snafu reported in July, was proof that frontier AI development needs to slow down. “It’s easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage,” Amodei wrote.
Trump’s views are the exact opposite. He wrote on Truth Social earlier this month that the data center backlash was due to a “hoax,” and that he would soon create an AI Force (which I suppose by now must have been renamed the “SI Force”), and that AI development should not be slowed down:
“[…]in much the same way as they changed the term ‘Global Warming’ to ‘Climate Change,’ in that it covers a much larger ‘territory’ of doubt, they are going straight at AI. We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows! However, we will also be looking for BAD, and we can do that, very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System.”
When James Comey didn’t say what Trump wanted to hear about “loyalty” back in 2017, he was almost immediately fired as FBI director. Almost a decade later, it’s Trump and Amodei who have a whole lot to disagree about as they sit down to chew food near one another.
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