Planners Meet On AI This Week

It’s turning out to be quite a week for artificial intelligence, as far as its treatment by both public sector and private sector leaders.

The first news that caught my eye was that last night, the president had dinner with none other than Dario Amodei, who he had previously characterized as “pretending to be a perfect little angel” due to Amodei’s reservations about runaway AI. The White House seems to have none of those reservations, but many legislators from both sides of the aisle have voiced concerns, and as for data centers, they are so bipartisanly unpopular that common attack ads for the midterms feature some candidate or other going along with plans to build them.

As for Amodei’s public warnings about the pace of change, these are a matter of public record. His company, Anthropic, tried to limit the use of its Claude model by the U.S. Department of Defense, to exclude two specific things: mass spying on American citizens, and completely autonomous lethal weapons. The Pentagon, strangely enough, didn’t bite, and the Hegseth regime insisted on pursuing “all legal uses.”

Then, the last few weeks, as less senior engineers left companies like Anthropic citing fears of AGI, Amodei added his two cents:

“AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” he said, according to a Reuters report. He said more, which is behind a Reuters paywall. Essentially, he was giving the world another warning.

The president didn’t like it, and fired off some abrasive stuff on Truth Social. But CBS coverage by Jo Ling Kent confirms the two had dinner last night, although details have been released.

Sino-U.S. Relations: Sept. 28 Edition

Also, Chinese president Xi Jinping visited the U.S. last week. CBS reported Saturday:

“China and the United States agreed to establish a channel for handling AI-related incidents and accelerate work on military crisis communications following a three-day summit between President Xi Jinping and President Trump in Washington, the two governments said Saturday.”