IBL News | New York
President Donald Trump rejected calls from top tech CEOs to slow down AI development, downplaying concerns that AI could go rogue.
He emphasized that the United States must maintain its competitive edge over China, declaring, “Whoever wins AI wins.”
Speaking to reporters at his Doonbeg golf resort in Ireland, the president said the dire warnings about AI were exaggerated and that “negative forces” are making claims about things that won’t happen.
“We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump said. “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.”
David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, responded to Altman and Amodei on social media:
“I don’t see what you see in the lab,” Sacks wrote on X on Sunday. “If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.”
But Sacks admonished tech leaders to “stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,” he wrote. “You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.”
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) September 13, 2026