Trump allies target Anthropic over CEO Amodei's AI doomer stance

Anthropic, ahead of its record-setting IPO, is being dragged into a fresh standoff with the Trump White House, as a memo moving through the Executive Mansion this week is setting up a political attack wave led by the president’s allies over CEO Dario Amodei’s AI “doomerism.”

According to the document seen by Axios, Amodei and his sister, Anthropic president Daniela Amodei, described as “The Anthropic knot,” have helped build “the AI-doom pipeline” that’s now polarizing opinions around the pace of AI development.

What’s in the White House memo about Anthropic?

The memo, which Axios attributes to a Trump political adviser, describes effective altruism as a fringe, cult-like group that does not represent the average American. The document also hit the usual conservative key points such as abortion, veganism and the idea of granting “digital minds” civil-rights-style protections.

That theme fits a message setting up a standoff between MAGA and Silicon Valley, with Anthropic staffers described as “Biden-era liberals, Democrats and strange Californians.”

Citing a source close to the Trump administration, Axios said that Amodei “is the embodiment of an ideology and globalist approach to innovation that’s counter to the president’s America First agenda.”

The memo also said that the Anthropic CEO prioritizes “foreigners over citizens, shrimp over families, future hypothetical people over the living.”

Anthropic has been fighting the effective altruism label

This is not the first time that the effective altruism philosophy has been attempted to be tethered to Anthropic.

Speaking in a 2025 Wired interview, Daniela Amodei said, “I don’t identify with that terminology,” while her brother, Dario Amodei has denied being a member of the movement in multiple press interviews. Amanda Askell, an early Anthropic employee who helps shape Claude’s constitution, refuted effective altruism as “not a theme of the organization.”

White House officials once canceled a proposed meeting between Trump and Amodei because “Dario’s a little too weird” for the president, per Axios, citing a senior official.

Trump and Amodei are facing off again

Amodei and Anthropic have drifted to the Trump admin’s bad side on multiple occasions, including getting hit with a supply chain designation earlier in the year.

This memo follows a public exchange with the president on September 14 when Trump accused Amodei of “pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel'” on Truth Social after the CEO’s essay urging labs to slow frontier AI development. Trump argued that the only guardrail the industry needs is “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”

Vice President JD Vance was also skeptical, telling reporters it “feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse” that so many AI firms are asking to be regulated. Trump’s AI adviser David Sacks has also publicly called fears of existential AI risk overblown.

The safety push is happening anyway

Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman agreed with Amodei on the need “to pace the frontier.” OpenAI global policy chief Chris Lehane told reporters on September 15 that his company had been working with Anthropic and Google DeepMind on AI safety for weeks, adding that OpenAI backs a provision in the FRONTIER Act requiring frontier labs to admit “independent verification organizations.”

The timing is awkward for Anthropic’s finances. The company has pushed its planned listing from October to November, according to Cryptopolitan, with backers weighing a valuation near $2 trillion and a raise of as much as $100 billion. Its most recent private round valued Anthropic at about $965 billion.

Axios said Trump surrogates see Amodei as an easy target ahead of the midterm elections, a prospect it called worrisome for investors betting on a record IPO.

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