Trump Rejects AI Slowdown Calls, Says Whoever Wins AI Wins

Key Points

1. Trump and AI adviser David Sacks defended minimal regulation after top AI chief executives backed a coordinated industry slowdown.
2. Amodei, Altman, Musk and Hassabis endorsed pacing development; more than 1,000 researchers signed a similar statement.
3. The split leaves industry-led restraint without clear White House backing on antitrust and coordination questions.

The latest:

President Trump dismissed warnings driving calls to slow artificial-intelligence development, telling reporters Sunday in Ireland that negative forces were raising things that won’t happen, according to the Wall Street Journal. He repeated that the United States must outpace China, saying whoever wins AI wins. His comments came a day after four leading AI chief executives endorsed a coordinated slowdown.

Details:

• The executives: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Alphabet’s Demis Hassabis said Saturday they support a coordinated industry slowdown in model development, the Wall Street Journal reported. More than 1,000 AI researchers recently signed a statement endorsing such a move.
• The antitrust problem: AI executives have said government support would reassure companies that coordinating among themselves wouldn’t violate antitrust rules. Amodei wrote in an essay Saturday that Washington should mediate or at least enable any coordinated slowdown to defuse those legal concerns.
• The White House position: AI adviser David Sacks argued on X late Saturday that government involvement isn’t needed if OpenAI and Anthropic, seen as the industry’s two leaders, simply agree to coordinate. “Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission,” the venture capitalist wrote, telling them they set the frontier themselves.
• The trigger: Alarm intensified this week after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit and published a viral warning about world-ending consequences if the technology grew out of control. Sacks and others in Silicon Valley said Coxon coordinated with nonprofits Republicans view as hostile to the industry. Coxon has said he acted alone.
• The China angle: Amodei told CBS in an interview aired Sunday that he hoped Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping could agree at their meeting later this month to ban using AI to develop biological weapons. He called a joint speed limit on AI progress a longer-term goal that would be very difficult given military incentives.
• Republicans in Congress: House Speaker Mike Johnson said on CNN that Congress should resist imposing an emergency moratorium, and that guardrails must be designed with the companies themselves. He said he discussed with Trump convening the top AI chief executives, who have rarely aligned fully on regulation.
• Democrats: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told ABC that Congress should take decisive action now to slow the technology, and said AI would be a priority at a Democratic meeting Tuesday. He declined to say whether he backs Senator Bernie Sanders’s proposal to ban superintelligence surpassing the most gifted humans.
• Obama’s warning: Former President Barack Obama urged Democrats at a private fundraiser Thursday to build a strategy with sensible guardrails. He said the technology is moving very fast in private hands and could become dangerous if it isn’t brought under control, according to his office.

Between the lines:

The executives are asking for something narrower than regulation: legal cover to coordinate without antitrust exposure. Sacks’s answer that they need no one’s permission sidesteps that request rather than granting it. With Johnson resisting legislation and Jeffries pushing for it, the only near-term path the companies named — federal mediation — currently has no backer inside the administration.

What’s next

The Trump-Xi meeting later this month is the first test of whether AI weapons limits enter US-China talks. House Democrats meet Tuesday with AI on the agenda, and Sanders’s superintelligence ban awaits a response.