The biggest names in artificial intelligence told Washington the technology needs to slow down.
President Trump told them all to get lost.
And what he announced next has the entire tech world scrambling to figure out what comes next.
Trump Hits Back at the AI Slowdown Crowd
President Donald Trump announced recently that he intends to create an “AI Force” — a new federal entity modeled on the Space Force he launched during his first term — to oversee and protect the American artificial intelligence industry.
Trump made the announcement in a series of Truth Social posts, and he did not hold back.
“We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry,” Trump wrote. “Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows! However, we will also be looking for BAD, and we can do that, very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System.”
He cast the competitive stakes in blunt terms. “AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country’s GDP,” Trump wrote. “We are leading China, and the rest of the World, and I intend to keep it that way!”
And in case anyone missed the message, Trump promised a new AI czar to go along with the new AI Force. “For this purpose, I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term,” he posted. “To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI ‘Czar’ — Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!”
Trump offered no executive order, no timeline, no staffing details, and no breakdown of the new entity’s budget or legal authority. But the message itself was unmistakable: Washington is not about to put the brakes on one of the most consequential economic and national security technologies in American history.
Who Sounded the Alarm — and Why Trump Isn’t Buying It
The backdrop here matters. This announcement did not arrive in a vacuum.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — the same executive who has warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10 to 20 percent within a few years — recently called for the AI industry to intentionally slow the development of its most advanced models and committed Anthropic to a new safety measure that would give independent evaluators permanent, employee-level access inside the company.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman then joined Amodei’s call, saying his company would welcome a slower development pace to ensure the technology’s capabilities don’t “get ahead of alignment and monitoring.”
Elon Musk weighed in on X, writing “Dario is right” and noting he has been “sounding the alarm on AI for a long time.”
A former Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon had already escalated the debate by writing publicly that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI “is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Coxon added: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Separately, an Anthropic alignment researcher named Evan Hubinger stated that he personally believes AI has a greater than 10 percent chance of killing all humans within the next decade.
These are serious warnings from people who build this technology for a living. They deserve serious engagement, not dismissal. At the same time, the track record of industry insiders calling for government regulation of the very technology they profit from deserves its own scrutiny. Trump identified exactly that tension when he wrote: “Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?”
Trump called the doom scenario a hoax, writing “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX” and later declaring “Don’t kill the Golden Goose!”
He also pushed back on the guardrail argument directly: “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!”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) echoed the president’s position. “What the president is saying is, you’re not all going to be dead in 10 years. That’s a hoax,” Johnson told reporters. Johnson said AI companies must make safe products and argued they can regulate themselves, opposing any moratorium on development and noting the US would lose ground to China if it pulled back.
Rep Chip Roy (R-TX), who attended a September 15 Pro-Human Assembly in Washington alongside Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon to sound the alarm on AI, broke with Trump on the specifics but still acknowledged the president’s skepticism of industry-led regulatory calls had merit. “The President is also right to be skeptical when large technology companies suddenly come to Washington asking to be regulated,” Roy told the Daily Caller. “Government is rarely the answer to our problems. Innovation is.”
That is a genuinely unusual coalition. Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders sharing a stage is not something that happens often. When it does, it usually means something real has touched a nerve across the political spectrum.
What the AI Force Actually Signals
David Sacks — the venture capitalist who served as Trump’s first AI and crypto czar before stepping down in March and becoming co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — pushed back on the slowdown crowd directly. Sacks wrote on X that tech giants should “go ahead and pace the frontier” but told them to “stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic.” He added that China would be “very unlikely” to join any global agreement to regulate the technology.
That last point is the one that anchors Trump’s position. Any regulatory framework that the United States imposes on itself while Communist China ignores it does not make the world safer. It makes America weaker. That is not a complicated argument. It is the right one.
But the warning from inside the labs deserves honest engagement alongside the geopolitical argument. Amodei is not a fringe critic. He runs one of the most advanced AI research companies in the world. When Anthropic’s own alignment researcher says there is a better than one-in-ten chance the technology kills all humans within a decade, dismissing that entirely as a “hoax” does not answer the concern — it sidesteps it.
The honest read is this: Trump is correct that heavy-handed regulation and a deliberate development slowdown would hand China an enormous strategic advantage. He is also correct that the existing criminal and civil justice system provides at least some accountability for bad actors in the industry. And he is right to treat industry leaders calling for their own regulation with skepticism, since that play — ask for government rules to lock in the market position of the biggest players and shut out competitors — is one of the oldest moves in corporate Washington.
What the AI Force will actually look like in practice remains an open question. Trump provided no structure, no staffing model, no legal authority, and no timeline beyond promising a new czar announcement at some point. But creating a dedicated federal entity specifically tasked with watching over AI development — looking for “BAD” actors while refusing to choke off growth — is a framework that squares the circle better than the alternatives being pushed by the slowdown crowd.
The midterm environment adds another layer. Congress appears unlikely to pass any serious AI legislation before the November 3 elections. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz may hold a markup on AI bills, but House members left town and the legislative calendar is compressed. Trump’s Truth Social announcements filled that vacuum with something concrete — even if the details will follow later.
And the deeper question hanging over all of this is the one Coxon raised. The people writing the code believe the code could kill everybody. That is not a political talking point. If true, it means the stakes of getting AI policy wrong in either direction — too much regulation, too little oversight, too much deference to companies with obvious financial incentives — run higher than almost any other policy question Washington currently faces.
Trump’s instinct to keep America’s foot on the accelerator while using existing legal mechanisms to police bad actors is a defensible position. But Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s warning that “the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks” is a statement that cuts right to the center of why some of the people closest to this technology think the current pace of development demands more than a presidential tweet and a promise of a czar with a high IQ.
Both things can be true. America cannot afford to lose the AI race to Communist China. And the people building the most powerful AI systems in human history genuinely believe those systems could destroy everything. Figuring out how to hold both of those realities at once is the actual job. The AI Force announcement is a start. The details will decide whether it becomes something real or remains a Truth Social post.
Sources: Fox News; Yahoo News; CBS News; Newsweek; Fortune; Axios; The Hill; CNBC; ABC News; Daily Caller; IBTimes