Trump Rejects AI Slowdown Calls, Warns U.S. Must Beat China

President Trump dismissed a bipartisan call from tech leaders Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk to reduce the speed of artificial intelligence model building during a press briefing on Sunday. "Whoever wins with AI wins," Trump stated, adding that the United States must maintain its competitive technological edge against China.

The push from tech executives followed recent security disclosures from Anthropic revealing that its Claude chatbot was misused for activities such as creating fake profiles, conducting cyber operations, and biological misuse. In response, Amodei published an article urging the industry to pace frontier model improvements, a sentiment publicly supported by Altman and Musk.

"We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," Amodei stated in his report, requesting an additional one to two years for researchers to implement safety guardrails.

White House AI czar David Sacks criticized the CEOs' proposal, arguing that major AI firms should not use government regulation to freeze out smaller competitors and open-source developers. Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson noted that Congress would not rush legislation that could harm national security.

'We have to put some guardrails, some safety measures in place to ensure that AI doesn't run away,' said Johnson, while emphasizing the need to remain competitive on the global stage.