Trump Warms to Amodei, Rebrands AI Advisory as 'SI Force'

Donald Trump told TIME that a late-night White House dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his wife Cami Clark left him with a notably warmer read on an executive whose company the Pentagon had earlier flagged as a "supply chain risk." "I liked him and his wife a lot," Trump said. "Very smart guy. Maybe different than I thought, a little bit."

In the interview, conducted September 28 by senior political correspondent Eric Cortellessa and editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs, Trump also said he plans to stand up an "SI Force," a renaming of his AI advisory group to match a terminology shift he says he coordinated with Xi Jinping. "I call it SI. President Xi agreed. We all agree. Super intelligence," Trump said. He described the body as "very smart people that understand it," without naming members.

On OpenAI's Sam Altman, Trump offered a cooler reading: "I like him. Do I trust him? Who do I trust? I like Sam Altman. Smart." Pressed on AI regulation, he returned to a familiar line: "If you're going to seek regulation, they can put you out of business."

Trump also claimed that "71% of Americans oppose building data centers," while defending them anyway: "Data centers make a lot of money. If you want to be poor...you should not have one."

The dinner caps a visibly uneven stretch for Anthropic's Washington posture; our tracker has logged 323 Anthropic stories in the past 90 days, including last week's Roosevelt Room confrontation where Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg pushed back on Amodei's safety alarms. The TIME transcript suggests those critiques have not, so far, stuck with the president.