Trump's dinner with Dario Amodei softens the rhetoric he and the Pentagon raised in February

For an AI lead at a federal contractor writing a vendor-risk memo in February, the easiest line to defend was the President's own Truth Social post about the "left wing nut jobs" at Anthropic. That post repeated Pentagon claims that the company would not let the Department of Defense use its models as it liked ^[2]. It came during a Pentagon campaign against the company, and Trump appeared to back that campaign ^[1].

That line is harder to defend this week. "I spoke to him about his views, and they're much different, I think, than what is portrayed in the media," Trump told Time, describing a dinner with Amodei that he said lasted two and a half hours ^[6][7]. He called Amodei a "very smart guy" who is "maybe different than I thought, a little bit. Really a little bit different. But no, he understands." ^[8] Gizmodo, which reported the remarks, wrote that what Amodei understands "is unclear" ^[9]. Its own theory is that Trump sees Amodei as the right-looking nerd to sell AI ^[10].

The February fight was over specific limits. Anthropic's safeguards bar its models from use in autonomous weapons and in spying on Americans ^[3]. According to Gizmodo, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Under Secretary of Defense Emil Michael regarded those limits as treasonous ^[4]. Gizmodo's account does not report any change to the safeguards or to the Pentagon's position. Everything it does report is spoken: a friendly exchange with reporters outside the White House on Tuesday ^[5], and the Time interview.

A February memo could have been guarding against either of two risks. One is reputational: being the buyer of a vendor the White House insults in public. The other is contractual: needing a model for work the vendor's own policy forbids, for a customer that objects to that policy. This week's remarks deal only with the first.

I'd reopen civilian evaluations now and keep defense-adjacent holds until something is on paper. That split has a cost. The defense-side team keeps waiting while civilian colleagues run pilots. Those pilots also rest on goodwill that one more post could take back, so their sponsors should write that risk into the memo.

For your own decision, start with the sentence in your memo that justified the hold, then sort it on two facts about your situation: whether the work touches defense customers, and whether the signal you rely on is spoken or written. Civilian work resting on a spoken signal is where this week helps. If the hold cited the Truth Social post, the Time interview answers it, and the evaluation can go back to product questions like accuracy on your own tasks and time to a working pilot. Civilian work resting on written terms never depended on the President's mood. Defense-adjacent work with only a spoken signal stays where it was in February. The most recent Pentagon position in the reporting is still the Hegseth and Michael objection ^[4]. Defense-adjacent work with a written change, such as revised usage terms or new Pentagon guidance, is the case that would justify moving.