‘Whoever wins AI wins’: Trump downplays the need for slowing down on AI because the US is ahead of China

“We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way,” Trump said. “Whoever wins AI wins.”

The president has placed a chunk of his economic legacy on AI development. The hype around the technology has led to record highs for the stock market, despite some investors’ concerns over a bubble and when investments will generate profits.

But the laissez-faire approach by the Trump administration is now of concern to the very executives that run some of the largest AI companies in the country. On Sept. 12, Amodei posted on X saying, “We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.”

Among the highlights, Anthropic is committing to third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to its systems. The hope is that the evaluators can verify safety measures, report on incidents and assess models.

Altman later quoted Amodei’s post on X, saying, “This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”

Not to be left out, Musk — the owner of xAI — wrote on X that he agrees with Amodei.

What damage can AI really do?

The united front shown by Amodei, Altman and Musk follows a couple of troubling AI events, particularly at Anthropic.

In early September, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, resigned and warned that the company and its competitors were not responsibly developing AI models. Coxon also used to work at OpenAI.

“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he wrote on X. Overall, an estimated $1 trillion will be invested in AI around the world in 2026, according to Goldman Sachs.

Coxon later said in an interview with the BBC that employees developing the systems are “genuinely frightened” for humanity’s future.

Anthropic additionally released a report on Sept. 10 titled Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026. In it, the company outlined some examples of the abuse of AI to date. Among them is its proprietary AI model, Claude, being used to create more than 4,700 fake dating app profiles that have exchanged messages with at least 25,000 people.

More troubling is that an initial version of Claude Opus 4.6 gained unauthorized access to a real third-party system during a cybersecurity test and tried to breach the system to test itself.

AI regulation is on the table for Democrats in November

In the same public appearance in Ireland, Trump attributed the warnings about AI to “negative forces,” though he did not specify what those forces are.

“I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” he told reporters. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”