President Trump rejected calls for AI regulation on Monday, attacking Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei following his public plea for slower AI development, and framing further oversight as a gift to China.
President Donald Trump on Monday rejected growing calls from technology leaders for greater oversight of artificial intelligence, arguing that executive leadership — not legislative guardrails — is sufficient to govern the industry's development.
"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 in a Truth Social post published Monday morning.
The remarks were directed in part at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who on Saturday published a blog post titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," calling for slower development of AI models to "reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong." Trump dismissed Amodei as now pretending to be a "perfect little angel," saying his administration had already acted to prevent AI figures from taking harmful actions.
"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!" Trump wrote.
The president's pushback comes amid a sudden convergence of alarm from prominent industry voices. Days before Amodei's post, a former Anthropic researcher quit and publicly warned that the technology could "kill us all by the end of the decade," accusing both OpenAI and Anthropic of "gambling with our lives." OpenAI chief Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk both said over the weekend that they agreed with calls to slow AI development.
Trump, by contrast, framed the debate in geopolitical terms, asserting that any regulatory slowdown would benefit China. "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. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!"
White House AI czar David Sacks echoed that position in an X post Saturday, pushing back on the notion that calls for a slowdown are motivated purely by safety concerns. "Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic," Sacks wrote. "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." Sacks added that China would be "very unlikely" to join any global agreement to regulate the technology.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., aligned with the White House on Sunday, warning against a rushed legislative response. "If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, that is a threat to every single American," Johnson told CNN's "State of the Union."
"We don't need everybody to panic right now, we need to handle this new technology like we have others in the past, and make sure we're doing everything we can responsibly to also not smother American innovation," Johnson added.
Any legislative action on AI regulation appears unlikely in the near term. House members are scheduled to leave Washington on Thursday and remain in their districts through October, ahead of the November 3 midterm elections.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump's post. With industry heavyweights now publicly divided on the pace of development — and the White House firmly opposed to new guardrails — the debate over how to govern AI is poised to intensify heading into the midterm campaign season.
Sara Montes de Oca is the Editor in Chief of TechEchelon. Previously a correspondent and producer in Washington, D.C., covering business, finance, and politics.
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