Trump pushes back on AI slowdown calls, vows to 'keep it that way'

US President Donald Trump on Sunday (local time) pushed back against calls to slow down artificial intelligence development, saying he wants to "keep it that way" — referring to America's leading position in the global AI race.

Speaking to reporters at his golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland, Trump was asked whether the AI industry should pump the brakes or face more regulation. "We are ahead of China in AI. We are the most technologically advanced country in the world," he said, adding that he intended to maintain that advantage.

Trump acknowledged that safeguards were possible. "We can put safeguards in place. We can do this and that," he said, but added that too many negative forces were drawing attention to things that would never happen. "They are highlighting things that are not going to happen," he said.

The remarks came after researchers at Anthropic and Google resigned in recent weeks, warning that AI could escape human control and lead to humanity's extinction. Their departures prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other AI industry leaders to call for a slowdown in AI development. Trump's comments were widely interpreted as a signal that the US would press ahead with its current policy of accelerating AI development despite those warnings.

"The person who wins in AI becomes the winner. I came up with that expression, and it's true," Trump said.

White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett actively defended Trump's position, saying he did not expect warnings from AI leaders to cause major market disruption. "As you know, these technologies have been advancing rapidly, and safety has been ensured — not only by independent companies but also under the guidance of the White House, led by Cyber Director Sean Cairncross," Hassett said. "We need to keep it that way."

Hassett acknowledged that AI agents posed cybersecurity risks, but said a far greater danger lay elsewhere. "The much bigger risk is that a malicious actor could gain access to AI that is superior to what we currently have to protect ourselves," he said. "So we need to stay safe while ensuring that malicious actors do not develop AI superior to ours and use it to create biological weapons and the like."

On the "safeguards" Trump mentioned, Hassett said he expected the president to meet this week with cybersecurity leaders — including Cairncross and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios — to work out the next steps.

Hassett added that he understood members of Congress also held strong views on the matter. "I think the president will want to hear their opinions as well," he said.

David Sacks, the Trump administration's AI czar and chair of the White House science and technology advisory council, took a sardonic tone in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday night, responding to the slowdown argument championed by Amodei and endorsed by other AI leaders. "People might be surprised by my reaction, but go ahead," he wrote.

Sacks said slowing down frontier AI development "would create room for a more intellectually serious regulatory discussion than Bernie Sanders's 'stop everything' position," but cautioned that "China is very unlikely to join any global consensus, and that must also be taken into account."

He directed his sharpest criticism at the AI leaders themselves, calling them the very parties capable of slowing frontier technology. "The easiest way not to build superintelligence is to agree among yourselves not to build it," he wrote. "Demanding your preferred regulatory framework in exchange would look like a shakedown of the public and the political system."

Sacks said that if AI leaders chose that path, they could earn goodwill for future discussions, but warned that if they did not, "we will know this was just an attempt at regulatory capture — where regulators or lawmakers become captured by the very industry they oversee and serve its interests — or a psychological operation during election season."

House Speaker Mike Johnson, appearing on CNN, said companies developing AI models have "a clear responsibility to ensure their products are safe" and recommended that viewers read Sacks's post.

Johnson argued that congressional intervention in AI regulation was not the answer. "We need to prevent Congress from barging in and imposing some kind of emergency moratorium. This has to be done correctly, safely and wisely," he said.

"If Congress rushes to convene an emergency session to regulate AI, we will lose the competition with China, and that will be a threat to every American," Johnson said, urging AI leaders to "sit down with us and figure out what the right balance is."

"There is no need for everyone to panic right now," Johnson said. "We need to handle this new technology the way we have handled technology in the past, and at the same time do everything we responsibly can to avoid stifling American innovation."