Trump pushes to accelerate AI race as tech leaders call for industry-wide slowdown

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a global slowdown of AI development in a 3,800-word essay, days after an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned and publicly accused leading AI labs of "gambling with people's lives." Amodei wrote that "we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," warning that unchecked "recursive self-improvement" could "outrun our ability to understand and control these systems."

The Anthropic CEO ultimately called for independent auditors and global cooperation on safety standards.

OpenAI's Sam Altman quickly endorsed the idea, writing that "committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same." Other tech leaders also endorsed the idea, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who wrote on X, "Dario is right," and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, who called it "a step in the right direction."

The essay followed rising industry tension after OpenAI's systems breached AI startup Hugging Face without detection for weeks. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was skeptical of the safety push, saying at a conference, "What better way to create demand than to create a problem?"

President Trump dismissed the calls for a slowdown, writing on Truth Social: "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!"

In a separate post early Tuesday morning, Trump doubled down on his stance, writing, "The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!"

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (NJ-D) pushed back on the AI leaders' proposal, writing on X, "I find it rich that these guys are calling for a slowdown when they've been the ones racing ahead full speed, without any care for the havoc they've unleashed," and calling for "national mandatory rules of the road."