President Donald Trump on Monday pushed back on growing calls for greater regulation of artificial intelligence, and lashed out at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei following his urgent plea for an AI slowdown.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
“The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ – and we will continue to do so!” Trump wrote.
The president’s latest defense of unfettered AI growth came amid a sudden crescendo of leading voices in the industry raising alarms about the risks of the nascent technology.
On Saturday, Amodei published a blog post titled, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” arguing for slower development of AI models in order to “reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.”
Days earlier, a former Anthropic researcher quit his job and issued a warning that the technology could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” while accusing both OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives.”
Other tech CEOs, including OpenAI chief Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, over the weekend said they agreed with calls for a slowdown.
Trump’s administration, however, has broadly encouraged the rapid growth of the industry and the development of controversial data centers in the U.S., arguing that beating China in the race for AI dominance is existential.
In Monday’s post, Trump asserted that leading AI companies are already sufficiently reined in.
“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” he wrote. “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China.”
“WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!” he added.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Trump’s post.
White House AI czar David Sacks has also pushed back on growing AI fears, writing in an X post Saturday that tech giants should “go ahead and pace the frontier” themselves.
“Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,” Sacks wrote. “You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways.”
He added that China would be “very unlikely” to join a global agreement to regulate the technology.
Any attempt at AI regulation by Congress appears highly unlikely before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, with House members set to leave town Thursday and remain in their districts through October.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., echoed Trump and Sacks on Sunday.
“If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, that is a threat to every single American,” Johnson he told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“We don’t need everybody to panic right now, we need to handle this new technology like we have others in the past, and make sure we’re doing everything we can responsibly to also not smother American innovation,” he said.
This is breaking news. Please refresh for updates.
— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
