Several video clips of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei looking visibly uneasy at the White House's superintelligence accord event have gone viral on X. The clips have drawn jokes, memes and some defence of his style. Netizens are calling Amodei lots of things like 'a nerd with ADHD who just can't stay still', while some say that he looks like 'he really needs to pee'.
Posts on X joked that Amodei needed better media training. Others turned the clip into memes ranking tech CEOs on personality scales, or imagined him wanting to go back to building superintelligence. Some users defended him, saying his manner came across as authentic. One commenter, quoted by the Spectator, said Zuckerberg and Trump adviser David Sacks were playing the cool friends of Trump while Amodei was cast as the awkward outsider.
What happened at the White House
On Tuesday, September 29, President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson hosted AI company leaders for a lunch at the White House. Afterwards, six companies signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, formally titled the Joint Commitment on Frontier SI Responsibilities. The signatories were Google's Sundar Pichai, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Greg Brockman and xAI's Elon Musk. Johnson called the accord voluntary, while Trump described it as "morally binding" and compared it to a constitution. The agreement carries no penalties.
The moment that went viral
The executives later appeared with Trump and Johnson in front of reporters on the White House lawn. Asked about AI safety, Amodei said the technology carries real risks. He also said that working with the president would let the US win the AI race safely. The Spectator described him as stepping forward haltingly, adjusting his glasses and chopping the air with his hands as he spoke. It said he then retreated to the edge of the group. Trump interjected during the exchange, saying "Dario has been fantastic" and joking that Amodei should "be careful". The other executives laughed.
What body language experts said
HuffPost asked two body language experts to review the footage. The report said that Amodei kept his arms close to his body and pushed one hand into the other. She said this is typically a self-comforting gesture. Both experts stressed that they were describing visible behaviour, not what Amodei was thinking. One said the online attention came more from the contrast in behaviour among Amodei, Trump and Zuckerberg than from any single gesture.
