Trump Rejects Calls to Slow AI, Citing China Race

DOONBEG, Ireland - President Donald Trump on Sunday likened critics of artificial intelligence to “very negative forces” raising scenarios that will not happen, and said the United States must remain the industry’s leader.

Asked at his golf course here whether the industry should slow down or be more regulated, Trump told reporters: “We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.”

“We could put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of very 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 remarks came a day after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called on labs to pace the frontier so safety work can catch up - a proposal publicly backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk. In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Amodei called U.S.-China competition the “toughest dilemma” in setting a speed limit, saying the military advantage of pulling ahead is so large that any check against cheating “has to be ironclad.”

Jacob Coxon, one of the Anthropic researchers who resigned last week and warned that the current pace of development was unsafe, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the United States would need international coordination, “or else we risk running the same race with China, which could be equally dangerous.”