Trump rejects AI slowdown calls, prioritizes US-China competition

President Trump stood at his golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland, on a Sunday afternoon in mid-September, watching the Irish Open when reporters asked him about artificial intelligence. His answer was direct: the United States was winning the race to build the most powerful AI systems, and he intended to keep it that way. Slowing down development, he suggested, would hand that advantage to China—a trade-off he was unwilling to make.

This stance put Trump directly at odds with some of the most influential voices in the AI industry itself. Just the day before, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, had published a blog post arguing that the entire sector needed to pump the brakes. The pace of capability improvements had outstripped the ability to build adequate safeguards, he contended. Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, agreed publicly. Elon Musk joined them. All three were saying the same thing: the industry should voluntarily slow its own development to create space for safety measures to catch up.

The pressure for restraint had been building. Jacob Coxon, a researcher who had worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI, had recently resigned in public fashion, citing concerns that AI systems were advancing toward capabilities that could exceed human control. His departure rippled through Washington and Silicon Valley alike. In Congress, lawmakers from both parties took notice. Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer and Republican Representative Mike Lawler introduced a bipartisan bill designed to prevent AI systems from operating without meaningful human oversight. The legislative machinery was beginning to turn.

But Trump's administration was not interested in that direction. When asked about guardrails and regulation, Trump acknowledged that some framework might be necessary—he offered no specifics. Instead, he suggested that many of the people raising alarms were motivated by something other than genuine safety concerns. "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 said. The implication was clear: the warnings were overblown, perhaps even cynical.

David Sacks, who had served as the White House's AI czar and now co-chairs the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, went further. He pushed back against the industry leaders calling for a slowdown, suggesting they were trying to use safety concerns as leverage to shape regulation in their favor. If the companies genuinely wanted to slow development, Sacks argued, they could simply do it without demanding government action in return. "Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it," he said.

The collision between these positions reflected a deeper tension in American technology policy. Data centers—the massive computing facilities required to train and run advanced AI systems—were being built across the country at an accelerating pace. Towns from Arizona to Texas to upstate New York were experiencing the arrival of these facilities, which consumed enormous amounts of electricity and water. The construction boom had begun to alarm local communities and environmental advocates. Public opposition was growing. Yet Trump had consistently backed the data center buildout, even as it became increasingly unpopular with voters.

What emerged was a clear policy direction from the White House: the administration would prioritize speed and American dominance in AI development over the safety concerns being raised by the industry's own leaders. The question of whether that calculation was correct—whether the risks of rapid development truly were overblown, or whether the warnings deserved serious attention—remained unresolved. Congress had introduced legislation. The industry's most prominent figures were calling for restraint. And the President had made his choice.