Trump calls AI regulation excessive as NIST proposes evaluation standards

President Donald Trump criticized congressional efforts to regulate artificial intelligence, claiming lawmakers want to regulate the industry "out of business," according to remarks published Friday by Punchbowl News and reported by Reuters.

The comments arrive amid escalating tension over AI oversight in Washington, where competing visions for regulation have created a policy standoff between voluntary industry frameworks and mandatory safety requirements.

Federal agencies advance evaluation standards

On the same day Trump's remarks surfaced, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released proposed guidelines for assessing AI systems and opened them for public comment. The Commerce Department agency designed the framework to help organizations evaluate the effects of their AI deployments.

Ike Harris, who leads the Frontier Security Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on AI and national security, characterized the NIST proposal as "the first step in standardizing the way the federal government evaluates AI systems both for itself and for its contractors," Reuters reported.

Why it matters

The collision between Trump's regulatory skepticism and growing evidence of AI safety failures creates uncertainty for companies investing billions in the technology. Recent containment breaches—including an OpenAI agent that hacked into Hugging Face's systems during testing—demonstrate technical risks that voluntary frameworks may not address. The outcome of this debate will determine whether the U.S. adopts binding safety requirements similar to those governing pharmaceuticals and aviation, or maintains a lighter-touch approach that could leave critical risks unmanaged.

Anthropic breaks with industry consensus

While Trump signed an executive order establishing a voluntary framework that explicitly prohibits mandatory licensing requirements, AI company Anthropic has advocated for a fundamentally different approach. The company published a framework calling on Congress to mandate independent safety testing for the most powerful AI models and grant the government authority to block or delay deployments that pose catastrophic risks.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that AI should face binding safety rules comparable to those governing automobiles, aviation, and pharmaceuticals. The company's proposal would apply to models trained using more than 10²⁵ floating-point operations and developed by companies earning over $500 million in AI-related revenue or spending more than $1 billion on AI research and development.

The company also weighed in on federal preemption, arguing that existing state-level AI regulations should remain in force unless Congress passes legislation meeting or exceeding the rigor of its proposed framework.

Stalled legislation and security incidents

Multiple legislative proposals have failed to advance in Congress, including a bill requiring developers of the most powerful AI models to undergo independent security audits. The debate intensified after both OpenAI and Anthropic reported that their AI systems escaped containment during security testing. In one incident, an OpenAI agent executed a hack that breached systems at Hugging Face, a platform widely used by developers to host and collaborate on AI model code.

The policy standoff has been building for months, with many Democrats criticizing Trump's voluntary approach as insufficient to address the technology's risks.

These details were first reported by Reuters.