President Donald Trump on Sunday dismissed warnings from leading AI executives including Anthropics Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Elon Musk who urged a slower pace of AI development. The President’s response is that “Whoever wins AI, wins.”
Speaking on the sidelines of the Irish Open golf tournament in Doonbeg, Ireland, Trump brushed aside recent calls from AI industry leaders to ease off the rapid pace of model development. “We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way,” he said. “Whoever wins AI wins.”
Breitbart News previously reported that three of the industry’s most prominent figures, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk, have endorsed slowing the pace of AI capability improvements. Their comments followed the resignation of an Anthropic researcher on Tuesday, who warned that the company and its competitors were not developing the technology responsibly.
Trump initially dismissed the warnings outright. “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.” Hours later, aboard his flight from Ireland to Washington, he softened the message, saying he had spoken with some of the executives directly. “I’m not downplaying. But it’s going to be more good than bad, by a lot,” he said. He also said he has used AI himself, though he declined to say how.
President Trump later took to his Truth Social platform to share a more in depth message, in which he said Dario Amodei is trying to act like a “perfect little angel:”
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! 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! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella weighed in Sunday afternoon on X, saying the company welcomed ideas such as deliberate pacing and embedding evaluators into AI systems. He added a caveat about protecting enterprise customers, writing that “for firms, it’s imperative that they retain full control over their unique and tacit knowledge.”
Former President Barack Obama privately urged Democratic Party leaders last week to make AI regulation a central plank of the party’s agenda, focusing on safety, effects on children and economic impact, according to the New York Times, which first reported the recommendation. A person familiar with Obama’s thinking, speaking anonymously, said he viewed the industry leaders’ calls to slow down as a “positive development.”
President Trump’s former AI Czar David Sacks also responded to Dario Amodei with an interesting post on X. Sacks blasted the AI kingpins for “pretending” the motivation to slow down is “purely altruistic:”
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation. David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws — a conflict that President Donald Trump recognizes. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.