President Donald Trump has dismissed warnings about the risks of artificial intelligence and rejected calls from senior industry figures to slow the pace of development, saying the United States was ahead of China and intended to stay there.
“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,” Trump told reporters on the sidelines of the Irish Open today. “And we can put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up.”
His comments followed a blog post published yesterday by Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic PBC, calling on the industry to slow down and arguing that the effort required industry and global coordination. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk, who runs xAI Corp, endorsed the message shortly afterwards.
Amodei said Anthropic would introduce new safety steps including the use of third-party evaluators, an idea Altman also said he would follow.
Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said today that Amodei’s proposal could serve as a model for the private sector, including by giving independent observers access to the models.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Hassett called AI safety a “solvable problem”. He said AI was advancing rapidly enough to potentially overcome existing cybersecurity defences, but that companies were also developing new safeguards.
He added that Trump administration officials Sean Cairncross and Michael Kratsios were also studying the issue.
Congress weighs its response
Some Democrats have seized on the risks around AI ahead of the November midterm elections and the 2028 presidential contest. Former president Barack Obama told a private fundraiser last week that Democrats should make AI oversight a central campaign issue, according to the New York Times.
Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware who helped introduce a bill to protect AI whistleblowers, said a lack of expertise in Congress risked hampering regulation while the Trump administration maintained a hands-off approach.
“We need agreement from Republicans and Democrats in Congress to put aside our partisan pre-election bickering and put in place some real guardrails before AI goes off the rails,” Coons said on Bloomberg This Weekend.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said on ABC’s This Week that House Democrats would meet as a caucus on Tuesday morning to discuss possible action on AI.
Mike Johnson, the House speaker, called for a partnership between the technology industry and government. His message to the companies, the Louisiana Republican said on CNN’s State of the Union, was that they “have a corporate responsibility to make sure your products are safe”.
“We have got to summon everybody together,” Johnson said. “I have talked to the president about this as well. They probably should be summoned together at the White House.”
Industry split on the role of government
Amodei said there was a role for government regulation. “Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say, and limits what the private companies can do,” he said in an interview aired today on CBS’s Sunday Morning.
David Sacks, Trump’s former AI czar and now co-chair of his technology advisory council, said AI companies did not need government permission to slow down or be more responsible. “You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack,” he wrote in a post on X. “The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways.”
Amodei told CBS a longer-term agreement with China would make sense to put a “speed limit on the rate of AI progress”, though he accepted it might be unrealistic. Verification would need to be “ironclad”, he said, because of the military advantages of pulling ahead. “Honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible. But we should try.”
Safety concerns have risen alongside a growing US backlash, fuelled in part by objections to the strain new data centres place on local power supplies. Concerns that AI is driving up electricity bills and taking away jobs have made it a central issue in the midterms.
“They’re bringing up things that won’t happen, but whoever wins, with AI, wins,” Trump said.
Amy Ingham
Amy Ingham is a reporter at Business Matters, covering UK business news with a focus on breaking news, business policy, late payments and insolvency. She joined the magazine in 2026 after completing the NCTJ Diploma in Journalism at Harlow College's journalism school. Her recent reporting includes British Steel's nationalisation and its impact on SME suppliers, the decline in late payments by large firms, and Insolvency Service director disqualifications. Reach her at aingham@cbmeg.co.uk.
