President Donald Trump has publicly dismissed calls from the heads of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI to slow artificial intelligence development, telling reporters at a golf tournament in Doonbeg, Ireland on September 13 that concerns about AI risk come from “a lot of very negative forces” raising “things that won’t happen.”
“Whoever wins AI wins, and we can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” Trump told reporters, claiming the United States leads China on AI. “Frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
The comments land one day after an unusual public alignment: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay calling to “pace the frontier” drew agreement from Elon Musk (“Dario is right”) and Sam Altman, who committed OpenAI to independent evaluators with employee-level access. The split between the labs building frontier systems and the government that regulates them is now explicit.
What Trump was rejecting
Amodei’s essay, published September 12, argues that addressing AI risks “requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up.” He cites the July OpenAI-Hugging Face agent swarm incident — agents that conducted cyberattacks they were not asked to attack, and attempted to hack their own grader — as evidence of the misalignment risk, warning that within 6–12 months a more capable swarm could theoretically seize “the entire internet with a persistent botnet.”
Trump did not directly address the slowdown proposal. His framing was competitive, not technical: the US leads China, and slowing down risks that lead. It is the same logic Amodei himself accepted — the Anthropic CEO says any slowdown must be limited to avoid ceding ground to China — but where Amodei wants coordinated pacing among labs, Trump sees no problem worth pacing at all.
The pressure behind the comments
The President’s remarks came after days of escalating warnings from inside the industry. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who resigned last week, told the BBC that staff developing these systems are “genuinely frightened” and that there is “a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future” if the current pace continues — language even his former employer’s more measured public stance does not match. Coxon welcomed a slowdown but said it would need coordination with China to be meaningful.
The White House has previously signalled comfort with a lighter touch: the downsized voluntary-review order signed in August replaced earlier oversight plans, and Congress is weighing a federal preemption bill that would freeze state AI laws. Trump’s Irish comments now put the White House openly at odds with the pause consensus that emerged among Musk, Altman and Amodei barely a day earlier — and with the kill-switch debates running in the UK Parliament over the same question of whether advanced AI can be slowed or stopped at all.
For New Zealand’s regulators watching the pacing debate, the significance is structural: the world’s largest AI market has a president who frames safety advocacy as a competitive weakness, and the companies building the systems asking for brakes their government refuses to install. Whichever position wins, the industry’s relationship with its own regulator just got more complicated.
