President Donald Trump and top lawmakers in Washington, have responded to calls urging big tech to slow down artificial intelligence (AI) development amid fears it may grow too powerful to be controlled.
Trump rejected the suggestion to slow AI development while speaking with reporters at his golf course in Ireland on Sept. 13.
“We’re leading China in AI,” Trump said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
The president noted that guardrails are an option.
“We can do this and that,” Trump added. “But I think you have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said he is working with Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John Thune (R-S.D.) on legislation to “address catastrophic risks involving biological or nuclear threats.”
“AI is advancing at an extraordinary pace, and some of the risks are dangerous and frightening,” Cruz wrote in an X post on Sept. 9.
“We need guardrails. But America needs to lead. If China leads the world in AI, the whole world is in trouble.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said AI will be a “high priority” during his caucus’s closed-door meeting scheduled for Tuesday.
“We certainly need to begin to act urgently to address the challenges that exist,” Jeffries said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Calls to slow down the advance of AI surged in recent days after OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon suggested that people building AI think it “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Days later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote a lengthy essay urging companies to deliberately slow the rate at which they increase the capabilities of their frontier models.
“Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems,” Amodei wrote.
The fears even caused OpenAI to pause plans to pursue an initial public offering in 2026.
“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an article published by business magazine Fortune on Sept. 12.
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