President Donald Trump responded Monday to warnings of potential dangers related to artificial intelligence by dismissing the need for any safeguards and calling AI concerns a “hoax.”
Trump rejected the idea of placing guardrails on AI, saying on Truth Social that the only control needed is “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
In the post, he appeared to hint at the government’s pursuing criminal or regulatory penalties against AI companies after industry insiders warned of potentially catastrophic dangers posed by the rapidly evolving technology.
“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’ — and we will continue to do so!” he said, referring to Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI chatbot.
Amodei said Saturday in an essay that AI companies should “slow the pace” of AI development.
Trump continued: “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”
Even as the American public and members of his own party grow increasingly skeptical of AI, Trump has framed the technology’s continued growth as an economic and geopolitical imperative. Communities that reject AI data centers will wind up “backwards and poor,” he warned recently. And in Ireland over the weekend, he was even blunter: “Whoever wins AI wins.”
Yet, a recent NBC News Decision Desk Poll found that 70% of adults said they were more worried about AI than excited about it. A similar percentage — 69% of adults — said they somewhat or strongly oppose building AI data centers in their areas. That includes 57% of Republican voters.
Trump remained undeterred Monday afternoon, returning to Truth Social in a full-throated defense of AI, saying, “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.” In the same post, he said AI would be “the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History — Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet.”
He later called in to the All-In Summit and made similar remarks to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. He posted in support of AI more than a half-dozen times Monday on Truth Social.
Amodei’s recent warning has prompted other AI leaders to publicly call for a slowdown in its development so researchers can better understand and control any threats posed by the technology. They include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said his company would adopt one of the safeguards Amodei proposed in his essay.
Last week, Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, writing in a viral X post that OpenAI and Anthropic were “gambling with our lives” and warning that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” A lead Anthropic researcher, Evan Hubinger, said on X that Coxon was right, saying that “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”
Many politicians responded with their own calls for stronger checks on AI to address safety concerns.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Monday called for a Senate briefing with top administration officials, while House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said he expects Trump to “summon” AI platform leaders for a “deliberate discussion about the responsibility of the companies to maintain safety and what role, if any, the government has to play in that.”
A meeting between Trump and AI leaders is “in the works,” but no timing has been nailed down yet, a source familiar with the matter told NBC News.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, told reporters Monday that he is “long-term pro-AI” but that he understands regulations could protect against a potentially “catastrophic event.”
“The notion that we’ve got the leaders of the most cutting-edge innovation going on in the world at this point and with the amount of capital into this saying, ‘Hey, we even think we need to slow down,’ and we don’t take that advice? ... I think we’d all look pretty damn silly if months from now we had an event that we could have stopped,” Warner said.
Some Republicans said AI regulation would not be feasible until after the November elections.
“To look at this Congress at this point in time and expect us in the foreseeable future to draft an AI regulation bill that strikes the proper balance between safety and innovation is not going to happen. Nothing’s going to happen, in my opinion, until after the midterms,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told reporters.
Kennedy added that in his view AI leaders were asking Congress for permission to slow their development, adding, “They don’t need our permission.”
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said what worries him about AI “is that you’ve got a bunch of people up here, literally, who are probably still driving their ’72 AMC Gremlins with some eight-track tape players — and they probably just parked their powder blue leisure suit a couple years ago — are going to be regulating something they have no idea what it is.”
He said he would like Congress to “bring in the industry people and figure this thing out and get it right.”
Former President Barack Obama on Monday called AI leaders’ move to slow the pace of development a “good and necessary first step,” saying it was time to “structure a more open, public and democratic conversation about AI.”
He said voluntary standards by companies were not enough.
“We need government — and specifically our leaders in Washington — to get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns, anticipate AI’s impact on jobs and our kids, and make sure that AI’s benefits are widely spread,” he said.
Obama called last week for AI policy to be prioritized within the Democratic Party.
Vice President JD Vance told reporters Monday that AI leaders’ warnings are “something that we’re concerned by” but said the administration wants to ensure “we actually regulate smartly.”
“I have to say, just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them,” Vance said. “It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse. So I think we just have to be careful about this.”
Beijing on Monday disparaged the warnings from U.S. tech leaders as “fearmongering” from a “Cold War playbook” aimed at hobbling China.
During his trip to Ireland, Trump asserted over the weekend that the U.S. was leading China in artificial intelligence and said, “Whoever wins AI wins.”
“We can put guardrails,” he said Sunday. “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.”
