Trump and Beijing reject Amodei's slowdown call from two opposite directions
Trump said no more AI regulation is needed and went after Amodei. China called the appeal a Cold War tactic aimed at holding it back.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's Saturday call to slow down AI drew sharp rejections on Monday from two centres of power: US President Donald Trump and the Chinese government. Both pushed back, for entirely different reasons.
Trump: the only guardrail is a strong president
In a post on Truth Social, Trump argued that no further regulation is needed: "The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!"
He also went after Amodei: "The Trump Administration has stopped AI 'people' from doing bad, or potentially bad, 'things,' like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a 'perfect little angel.'" Trump added that "There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China," and repeated his line that "whoever wins AI, wins."
White House AI czar David Sacks wrote that companies could pace themselves without regulation. House Speaker Mike Johnson said rushing a law through would "lose the race to China." No AI regulation is expected to pass before the 3 November US midterm elections.
China: this is a Cold War playbook
In his essay Amodei called not only for a slowdown but for continued restrictions on sales of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to China, warning that "a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world."
China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun responded: "Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one's interest." The state newspaper Global Times called the essay a "Cold War playbook" that appears to be about global security on the surface but is "packed with containment provisions targeting China."
Background
Tension had risen last week when the FBI, NSA and CISA issued a joint advisory alleging that Chinese developers had engaged in "aggressive, malicious" efforts to extract, or "distill," capabilities from advanced US models such as Claude and GPT. China's Commerce Ministry dismissed the claims as groundless, said distillation is common across the industry, and accused the US of seeking a "monopoly of the AI industry."
Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance in Washington on 24 September. Amodei had acknowledged that a global speed limit would require cooperation with China; with each side trying to deny the other a technological chokepoint, how hard that will be is now on full display.
