Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei went from a MAGA smear campaign target, to a "Saturday Night Live" punching bag, to a private White House dinner with President Trump — all in the space of 72 hours this weekend.

• Such is life for the face of AI in America, Axios' Ben Berkowitz writes.

The big picture: Amodei may not have sought the status. But Anthropic's quirky, intellectual CEO has become the frontman for a technology that seems to be changing the world by the day.

• In the history of capitalism, there has seldom been a more unusual spokesman for a transformative industry. A physicist by training with links to effective altruism, Amodei runs Anthropic in a way some inside and outside the company have compared to a religious leader.
• His penchant for plainspokenness — especially on the risk of disaster from his own product — has earned him admirers and critics in equal measure, though he has remained consistent in his positions for years.

This weekend's SNL sketch captured what often frustrates allies about him: The character called for more regulation and a slowdown to establish greater safety, while advancing the theory that he and Anthropic are best-equipped to be at the vanguard.

• A looming IPO could make Amodei one of the world's multibillionaires, provided he doesn't scare everyone off first.

👀 The intrigue: OpenAI's Sam Altman does more press, and fits the traditional CEO mold much more neatly.

• Despite that — or, perhaps, precisely because he's more unvarnished — Amodei has become the first mogul many people think of when they think of AI.

Between the lines: Consider how Anthropic spent the last few days.

• ⚠️ On Thursday, Axios' Maria Curi and Marc Caputo scooped a new MAGA memo doing the rounds at the White House that sought to paint Amodei as the poster child of the effective altruism movement, a recent bogeyman for conservatives who want a more muscular future for AI. (Anthropic has said Amodei doesn't identify as an effective altruist but is sympathetic to some of its tenets.)
• 🍽️ By yesterday, Maria and Marc scooped that President Trump had personally invited Amodei to a 10 p.m. dinner. "Tonight, I'm having dinner with the head of Anthropic ... with Dario ... very highly respected, from Anthropic," Trump said last night when he landed at Joint Base Andrews. Critics tried to reach Trump with a hit piece on Amodei hours beforehand.

💡 Nothing changed in between. But it reflected the rocky relationship between the company and the administration throughout 2026.

• In between, Amodei got the SNL treatment — an unflattering "Weekend Update" sketch that painted him as barely able to complete a sentence without saying AI was going to kill us all.

Reality check: Bad press hasn't stopped Anthropic from growing at almost unimaginable speed.

• The company is on pace for an annual revenue rate of more than $100 billion, more than 10x where it was a year ago.
• If the IPO goes as planned, and the revenue keeps up, by the end of the year Anthropic could be one of America's 50 largest companies by revenue and 10 largest by market capitalization.

😮 Stunning stat: Anthropic didn't even exist six years ago.

• In less than a decade, Amodei will have gone from a somewhat obscure scientist to one of the most important people in human history.

Share this story ... Axios' Bradley Olson contributed.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is launching a five-week campaign blitz that will take him to more than 40 congressional districts across 22 states in the 36 days before Election Day, Axios' Kate Santaliz reports.

• Why it matters: Johnson is going all-in on defending his party's House majority as the political terrain disintegrates for the GOP.

🗳️ Zoom in: Johnson's campaign swing will be split evenly between Republican-held seats the party is fighting to defend, and Democratic-held districts the GOP hopes to pick up.

• The speaker begins his travel this week in Louisiana and New York.
• He'll also campaign in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Read on.

The day after rejecting an Iranian proposal to end the war, President Trump told Axios' Barak Ravid in a phone interview that U.S. negotiators will engage in more talks with the country this week:

Qatar and other regional mediators are trying to revive negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, but the two sides are far apart on the key issues, Barak writes.

• While Iran wants to focus any talks on the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. naval blockade, the Trump administration is demanding that Iran agree to nuclear concessions.

"I expect more talks with Iran [this week]," Trump said. "They want to make a deal, but it is not the deal that I want to make. It is what we would have maybe agreed to a year ago. They overplayed their hand."

• Asked if he is considering resuming strikes against Iran, Trump said: "I am always thinking about it."

Keep reading.

"Cancer can make your world very small. I worked hard not to let it," White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles writes for USA Today about fighting breast cancer while holding one of the world's highest-pressure jobs:

"The approach I took will not be right, or possible, for everyone. I have profound respect and empathy for every person enduring treatment for this disease. It drains you physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. For me, work provided something critically important: a mission larger than myself. … Work did not make the cancer disappear from my mind. However, it reminded me that I was still myself — and that my life was about more than my disease."

"I hope sharing my story might offer some strength to even one person still in the fight," Wiles, who announced earlier this month that she's cancer-free, said on X.

• "Yes, cancer took something from me, but it also gave me a deeper appreciation for the people who carried me, the purpose that sustained me, and the preciousness of every day," her piece concludes. "I am grateful to every one of them. And, most especially, I am grateful to God."

Read her essay.

U.S. Travel Association president and CEO Geoff Freeman shared some illuminating tourism stats with Axios CEO Jim VandeHei for his weekly Axios C-Suite newsletter. Here's a look for AM readers:

Despite hosting the World Cup, the U.S. saw a decline in overseas travel this summer.

• America's on pace for overseas visitors to drop by 2 million from last year — down 20% from the '19 peak.

"We're the only major country in the world losing visitation," Freeman says. "It's mind-boggling."

• Travel from longtime allies has cratered — including from Canada (down 23% over two years), Germany (down 16% year to date) and France (down 15% YTD).

🌏 Two big winners from the U.S. tourism slide:

• China, which has expanded visa-free entry.
• Japan, where a cheap yen and rising reputation as a prime destination have driven a long-term inbound resurgence.

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• 📈 If you're a CEO or on a CEO's team: Ask to join Jim's new weekly Axios C-Suite newsletter.

AI companies, private equity firms and unions are banding together to form a new multimillion-dollar coalition to make the case for responsible growth in seven key states, Axios' Hans Nichols reports.

• Why it matters: The new group, the American Infrastructure Alliance, wants to partner with state and local officials to create clear standards and guardrails for data centers in 2027. In return, the coalition hopes to head off any moratoriums on new construction.

The group plans initial campaigns in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Indiana and South Carolina.

• The alliance is backed by Blackstone, OpenAI, QTS and SoftBank Group, along with key unions, including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW).

🔭 Between the lines: The group represents an initial investment in a broader battle over AI and data centers that will likely bleed into the 2027 state legislative battles and the 2028 presidential campaign.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang this morning unveiled an Nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform with more than 100 industry partners, including Anthropic, Hugging Face, IBM, Microsoft and Palantir.

• AI's "full promise can only be realized when people have confidence that AI is being built to be safe and deployed with wisdom and responsibility," Huang wrote on X. "Safety is how trust is earned."

Why it matters: The platform can spot a rogue agent in milliseconds. Nvidia wins more business when agents work safely.

Between the lines: Nvidia's announcement says that reports from frontier labs about rogue agents "have led to a serious debate about the pace of agent development. We believe we need to increase the pace of AI safety research and engineering in collaboration with frontier labs and the broader community."

• Huang calls the platform "the beginning of an open ecosystem to build the trust layer for safe agent systems. Together, we are building the foundation of the AI economy."

Read the announcement.

Next year's home paint palette is getting greener and more adventurous, Axios' Sami Sparber writes.

Paint companies Behr, Valspar and Sherwin-Williams recently named their picks for the next big hues in home design:

• Behr chose Grounded, a "mossy olive," as its 2027 color of the year.
• Valspar went with Cottage Door, a comforting gray-blue.
• Sherwin-Williams picked Celery, a pale green that looks just like, well, the vegetable.

Read on.