Donald Trump rejects calls from tech bosses for an AI slowdown
President denounces demands for regulation as existential fears over technology move to the centre of US politics
Donald Trump has rejected calls for an AI slowdown after tech bosses and Democrats urged tighter regulation of the industry over rising fears that the technology poses an existential threat.
The heads of some of the leading US AI groups — Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — this weekend called for a more cautious pace of development following dramatic safety warnings over rapidly advancing model capabilities.
But the president said on Sunday that while some “guardrails” were possible, it was imperative for the US to retain its international leadership in the area.
“Look, we’re leading China in AI . . . and, frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump told reporters during a trip to his Doonbeg golf course in Ireland.
“We can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” he added.
Safety concerns surrounding the rapid pace of AI advances were thrown into the spotlight over the past week after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned with a warning that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Anthropic chief Amodei responded in an essay on Saturday that the industry “must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” and called for the monitoring of frontier companies by third-party evaluators, the establishment of industry safety standards and global co-ordination of rules.
Altman and Musk voiced support for the proposals.
But the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers pushed back, arguing that the companies can take steps to slow their advance without the need for drastic measures that would hand a competitive edge to China.
The president’s former AI tsar David Sacks said on Saturday night that the companies should “stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission”.
“Go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it,” Sacks wrote on X.
“The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.”
Mike Johnson, Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, urged people not to “panic” as he echoed Trump’s concerns about China and called for a meeting between tech bosses and lawmakers at the White House.
“We cannot put a moratorium on this, because China will overlap us, and that’s the challenge. It’s national security, balanced with the immediate security of making sure the models are safe,” Johnson told CNN’s State of the Union.
Democrats lashed out at the Republican response and demanded rapid steps towards industry regulation. Arizona senator Ruben Gallego accused both Johnson and Trump of “not meeting the moment” on the threat posed by AI.
“We can’t just use this idea that if we do this we’re somehow going to lose to China, because AI does not care, once it becomes fully dangerous, whether we’re Chinese or American,” he said.
Hakeem Jeffries, House minority leader and Johnson’s Democratic counterpart, told ABC This Week that Republicans had “abandoned their responsibility” and called for Congress to “take decisive action now”.
Coxon, the former Anthropic researcher, on Sunday welcomed Amodei’s proposal as a “substantial step” towards slowing the unchecked advancement of frontier AI but said there was a need for “more engagement with China”.
“The concept of building a superintelligence . . . it’s been likened to summoning an alien species,” he told ABC. “So I think thinking about it in terms of an alien mind that we don’t fully understand is — is pretty terrifying.”