DOONBEG, Ireland: President Donald Trump rejected a Trump AI slowdown on Sunday, saying the United States should maintain its lead over China rather than curb development of more powerful systems.
“We’re leading China in AI,” Trump told reporters. He said the government could impose “guardrails” but argued that slowing development risked weakening U.S. competitiveness.
His comments followed public calls from Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk to reduce the pace of frontier AI development.
Amodei wrote Saturday that companies should slow capability improvements long enough to give researchers more time to develop safeguards. Altman publicly agreed with the need to “pace the frontier,” while Musk wrote that Amodei was right.
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The debate intensified after Anthropic released a company report Thursday covering what it called disrupted misuse of its Claude models between December 2025 and August 2026.
Read: Trump AI Race Stance Puts China Lead Ahead of Slowdown
Anthropic said the cases included cyber operations, scams, surveillance, biological misuse and attempts by rival AI companies to extract responses for model training.
The claims come from Anthropic’s own report and were not independently verified in the supplied material. Amodei has proposed independent reviewers with employee-level access to AI systems. Altman said OpenAI would support a similar approach.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that Congress should consider AI safeguards without moving so quickly that it harms U.S. competitiveness with China.
White House AI and crypto adviser David Sacks separately argued that companies seeking slower development could reduce their own pace without forcing rivals to do the same.
