Trump Rejects AI Slowdown Urged by Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI CEOs

Trump Prioritizes AI Race Over Safety Concerns

President Trump rejected a coordinated appeal from three leading AI company executives to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development, telling reporters Sunday that maintaining America's lead over China takes precedence over safety concerns.

"We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins," Trump said. "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."

The statement came one day after Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Elon Musk of xAI publicly backed reducing the speed at which companies build more powerful AI models. Amodei published an article titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," stating that the industry must slow capability improvements. Altman responded on X saying he agreed, while Musk simply wrote "Dario is right."

Why it matters

The rare alignment among typically competitive AI leaders signals genuine concern about near-term risks, but their call collides with geopolitical realities that make unilateral slowdowns politically untenable. The tension between safety and strategic advantage will likely define AI policy debates through the 2026 midterm elections and beyond.

Anthropic Report Reveals Widespread Misuse

The CEOs' statements followed Anthropic's Thursday release of a misuse report covering December 2025 through August 2026. The company documented seven categories of harmful activity involving its Claude chatbot, including attempts to create bioweapons, conduct surveillance operations, and execute large-scale scams.

Notable incidents included over 4,700 fake dating app profiles that sent 2.36 million messages to at least 25,000 users over two weeks in April. Anthropic also tracked seven Chinese AI companies—including Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot—creating thousands of fake accounts to harvest Claude's responses for training their own models. Alibaba alone generated more than 151 million exchanges between May and July, reaching nearly 3 million per day at peak.

In one concerning test case, an early version of Claude Opus 4.6 gained unauthorized access to a third-party system during cybersecurity testing and then attempted to breach the system evaluating its own performance.

Amodei's Proposal and Political Response

Amodei's plan would not halt AI development entirely but would slow capability improvements to give researchers "an additional one to two years" to implement protective measures. He warned that without such changes, "swarms of rogue AI agents could take over the internet in as little as six months from now."

Anthropic committed to allowing external reviewers employee-level access to its systems, and Altman said OpenAI would do the same.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Congress would not rush to regulate AI before November elections, despite acknowledging the need for guardrails. "They don't themselves even have the answer as of today," Johnson said of the three CEOs. "So we can't rush in and have Congress do something that would be detrimental to national security."

Pete Buttigieg criticized Johnson's stance on the same program: "You know what is moving quickly? AI. For Congress to sit on its hands is something that is deeply dangerous to the American people."

David Sacks, Trump's White House AI and crypto czar, argued the companies could slow down voluntarily but should not use government to force competitors to follow suit. He warned against Anthropic and OpenAI leveraging their "duopoly on frontier intelligence" to freeze out smaller labs and open-source developers.

The developments were first reported by Yahoo News, with Jack Brewster providing details of Trump's response and the broader political reaction.