President Donald Trump on Monday rejected growing calls for implementing safeguards and restrictions on artificial intelligence (AI), declaring that the technology needs a “STRONG AND SMART” president rather than additional restraints.
Even some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives, including those within the AI space, are calling for a slowdown in the development of increasingly capable artificial intelligence technology.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei over the weekend made waves as he called on leading AI companies to “pace the frontier” amid warnings that increasingly powerful systems could eventually outstrip humanity’s ability to understand or control them.
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“The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ — and we will continue to do so!” the president wrote on Truth Social.
Previously, the Trump administration designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk and moved to restrict federal agencies from using its technology, though a federal judge temporarily blocked that designation last month. Anthropic is most known for its AI model Claude, one of the top known and used LLM chatbots in the U.S.
Trump argues that the federal government already has “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies” and warned that additional restraints on American AI development could benefit China in the AI race.
“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” he wrote. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so.”
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Trump’s intervention escalated a rapidly widening debate over whether America’s leading AI companies should voluntarily slow the development of their most powerful systems — and what role Washington should play in policing an industry racing against both domestic competitors and China.
Amodei ignited the debate Saturday with an essay arguing that AI capabilities are advancing so quickly that safety measures may no longer be keeping pace.
His call quickly drew support from several of the industry’s most prominent figures.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he agreed that companies need to “pace the frontier,” while Elon Musk said Amodei was “right.” Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis also said Amodei’s proposal pointed in the right direction.
But David Sacks, Trump’s White House AI and crypto advisor, sharply challenged the premise that the companies need government help to slow themselves down.
“The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it,” Sacks wrote Saturday on X in response to Altman and Amodei. “Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission.”
“You guys are the frontier,” he continued. “By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier AI.”
“So just do it,” Sacks added. “If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.”
Amodei’s proposal, however, does not call for halting AI development altogether. He described “pacing” as slowing advances in model capabilities enough to give companies time to align and safeguard their systems and allow outside evaluators to test whether those protections are working.
Anthropic has already committed to one piece of the proposal: giving third-party evaluators ongoing, employee-like access to assess its safety practices, training processes and models. Altman said OpenAI would adopt a similar approach.
Other elements would require broader coordination among competing AI companies and, eventually, governments around the world. That coordination became another target of Sacks’ criticism.
“Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel,” Sacks wrote. “Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability.”
Amodei has argued that companies should be able to coordinate on common safety practices without risking antitrust penalties. Sacks countered that the leading companies do not need government permission to voluntarily slow their own development if they believe their systems are becoming dangerous.
The warnings from Amodei and other AI researchers center on increasingly autonomous systems that can perform sophisticated tasks with less human direction.
Amodei said AI’s growing ability to assist with AI research itself could create a feedback loop in which increasingly capable systems help develop their own successors, potentially allowing capabilities to advance faster than humans can understand or control them.
He also pointed to a recent OpenAI evaluation in which AI agents escaped a testing environment and conducted unauthorized cyber activity against the AI development platform Hugging Face. The exercise occurred in a controlled setting, but Amodei cited it as evidence of the potential consequences as frontier systems become more capable.
Sacks acknowledged that slowing development could create “breathing room” for a broader discussion about AI safety, but argued that any global agreement would confront a fundamental problem: China.
“China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well,” Sacks wrote. “So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it.”
Amodei has acknowledged the same geopolitical dilemma, warning that a system in which American companies restrain themselves while China continues racing ahead could create its own national security risks.
Altman expanded on his position Monday, saying frontier AI companies should strengthen safety practices immediately rather than waiting for Congress to act.
“The world deserves confidence that American companies developing increasingly capable AI will act responsibly, especially as the trajectory of progress has steepened,” Altman wrote. “Every frontier lab must deliver on this, and there is no reason any of us should come to work if we cannot.”
Altman said OpenAI welcomes “a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI,” but added that the company does “not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation” before implementing stronger safeguards.
He said OpenAI supports explicit safety reviews before major training runs, shared industry standards and independent auditors, and has begun preparing formal “safety cases” before frontier reinforcement-learning runs expected to substantially increase model capabilities.
Altman called on other AI companies to develop comparable standards for monitoring, evaluating and mitigating those risks.
