Anthropic

The biggest names in AI are walking into the White House today. President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson will sit down Tuesday with the heads of Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia and Palantir, plus OpenAI’s president, for a luncheon meant to get Washington and Silicon Valley talking the same language about AI safety. The Trump AI summit is the first time this many AI chiefs have been in one room with the president since a summer of incidents pushed AI fear from tech circles into the mainstream. And the timing is awkward: two days ago, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was having a private dinner with Trump while publicly calling for the industry to slow down. On Monday, he ducked reporters on Capitol Hill who asked about it. ...

Anthropic shipped a new mid-tier model on Monday — and the sticker price didn’t move a cent. Claude Sonnet 5.5, the second model in Anthropic’s Claude 5.5 family, went live on September 28, 2026. Pricing holds steady at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, unchanged from its predecessor, Sonnet 5. The pitch is efficiency instead: Anthropic says the new model generates output more than 30% faster and needs far fewer tokens to finish the same work, cutting the cost of a completed task by up to 30%. ...

Donald Trump sat down for dinner with Dario Amodei on Sunday night. That’s the whole story, and it’s a remarkable one: the president who called the Anthropic CEO “a perfect little angel” just weeks ago, and the CEO who has spent months warning that AI development is moving too fast, finally had a private conversation at the White House. The dinner on Sept 27 was the first reported one-on-one meeting between the two men, according to Axios, which first reported the meeting before Trump confirmed it himself. Trump announced it during a Fox News interview at the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Illinois, using the same appearance to make clear he isn’t buying Amodei’s central argument. Slowing AI development, he said, would open the door for China. ...

A federal appeals court just told Anthropic that its own safety features are the reason it can’t sell AI to the Pentagon. In a 2-1 decision handed down Friday, Sept 25, the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC upheld the Defense Department’s blacklisting of the AI startup, siding with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a fight that has now cost Anthropic billions of dollars in lost contracts and scrambled one of the most important commercial relationships in military AI. ...

The AI compute gold rush just took another strange and very expensive turn. Akamai Technologies said Thursday, September 24, 2026, that it signed an $11.6 billion cloud services agreement with Anthropic — the largest AI customer commitment in Akamai’s history. The seven-year contract can grow by another $9 billion, pushing the potential total to about $20 billion. Investors liked the math: Akamai shares surged 22% in extended trading after the announcement, Reuters reported. ...

The AI price war just went from background noise to front-page strategy. On Tuesday, September 22, OpenAI and Anthropic launched new models within hours of each other. Both launches centered on the same selling point: cheaper AI. OpenAI priced its GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna models 50% below the promotional API rates of the GPT-5.6 models they replace. Anthropic said its Claude Opus 5.5 costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads. ...

On September 22, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5.5 at roughly 40% lower cost than Opus 5, and about 90 minutes later OpenAI answered with GPT-6 Sol and Luna at half of last generation’s prices. Full breakdown in the slides above. Sources: Simon Willison (simonwillison.net), AI Explainer India, Intelligibberish, AI Briefing Room citing Reuters — September 22–26, 2026.

Google, OpenAI and Anthropic — the three labs racing hardest to build the world’s most powerful AI — now want to set the rules for how safe that AI has to be. And they want to do it themselves. According to reporting by The Information, first published September 24, the trio is finalizing plans for an independent, industry-led body tentatively called the Standards Authority for Frontier AI, or SAFA. It could launch by the end of 2026 or early next year. Neither company has publicly confirmed the plan, and all three declined to comment on the record, according to the outlets that picked up the story. ...

President Trump will jointly launch the new unified US government website America.gov next Tuesday alongside multiple tech and AI leaders, per Bloomberg. Full story in slides above — sources: Bloomberg via PANews, September 26, 2026.