14 September 2026 · Politics & Regulation
President Donald Trump on Sunday dismissed calls from leading AI executives to slow frontier development, describing some of the loudest safety warnings as the work of “very negative forces.” He framed regulation as a risk to America’s lead over China rather than as a safeguard.
The comments landed hours after Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Satya Nadella aligned publicly around “pacing” capability gains. Trump’s response puts the White House on the opposite side of that coalition and keeps AI at the center of U.S. political argument.
The administration has already used its AI Action Plan to speed data-center permitting and to expand pre-release model evaluations through the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation. Officials have argued that the United States should not cede compute or model leadership while rivals scale.
Senate negotiators have separately discussed legislation that would require firms to mitigate known major risks and could involve federal courts if the government sought to block a release. Those talks now sit against an explicit presidential rejection of a development slowdown.
Key takeaway Washington is split: several lab CEOs want coordinated pacing, while the president treats a slowdown as a gift to geopolitical competitors.
Photo: Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons. Sources: Financial Times, Reuters, Associated Press, New York Times.
