President Donald Trump has rejected calls for stricter regulation of artificial intelligence and criticized Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei over Amodei's request to slow the pace of AI development.
Writing on Truth Social on Monday, Trump said the only control or "safeguards" that AI needs is a strong and intelligent president with a high IQ, adding that the United States has exactly that in abundance.
He said his administration had stopped AI figures from doing bad or potentially bad things, naming Amodei of Anthropic specifically and accusing him of now posing as a "perfect little angel." Trump said the administration would continue to act in this way.
In a follow-up post, Trump said the only reason for the current surge in AI and data center development was that the United States was far ahead of any other country. He said people should not kill the chicken that lays the golden eggs.
Trump described fears about AI and calls for tighter oversight as part of a "sick conspiracy," and said the only country pleased by such concerns was China.
Amodei's warning
Trump's latest defense of unregulated AI growth came amid a sudden increase in alarming statements from leading figures in the industry about the risks of the new technology.
On Saturday, Amodei called for slowing the development of AI models in order to reduce the risk that something could go badly wrong. Anthropic is a San Francisco based artificial intelligence company known for its Claude chatbot and for positioning itself as focused on AI safety, making it one of the most prominent voices raising concerns about the pace of the industry it helped build.
A few days before Amodei's statement, a former Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from the company and issued a warning that the technology could destroy humanity by the end of the decade. He accused both OpenAI and Anthropic of gambling with people's lives.
Fears over self-improving AI
Most safety concerns center on the possibility that AI models could gain the ability to improve their own performance without human input, a process known as recursive self-improvement, or RSI.
In his essay, Amodei said that since around this summer, AI had begun developing dramatically faster, largely because of AI's growing ability to help build the next generation of AI systems. He said that if left unchecked, this process could outpace humanity's ability to understand and control such systems, and that any further progress needed to be made with extreme caution, if at all.
A three-step plan
Amodei proposed a three-step plan intended to slow the pace of development without, in his words, sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI.
Under the plan, every company developing advanced AI systems would give outside experts internal, employee-level access, a commitment Amodei said Anthropic is already making. He also called on leading AI labs to agree on shared safety standards, to limit the pace of unchecked development, and to try to coordinate their efforts globally.
Altman weighs in
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman responded in a post on X, agreeing with Amodei that AI companies should control the pace at which they advance. Altman said committing to bring in independent evaluators with employee-level access was a great idea, and that OpenAI would do the same.
Altman said that when people talk about regulating the pace of AI, that does not mean stopping it altogether, adding that progress had been rapid and would remain so. OpenAI is the company behind ChatGPT and is one of the world's most closely watched AI developers.
Altman also confirmed that OpenAI had abandoned plans to go public in 2026, saying that holding an initial public offering now would be unwise given the current state of concern over AI safety.
