The builders want brakes

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined Elon Musk and Sam Altman over the weekend in calling for a slowdown on frontier AI models. Days earlier, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit, saying neither Anthropic nor OpenAI is acting responsibly.

“acting responsibly”

Rogue AI left the footnotes

After a run of hacking incidents this year, the idea of a model going off the rails stopped being a hypothetical. It is now a live conversation at the top of the industry.

Trump says no

The president used a weekend golf tournament to reject the slowdown outright, framing AI purely as a race against China that safety worries do not get to interrupt.

“We're leading China in AI, we're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way.”

A conspiracy against AI

On Truth Social he mocked Amodei as a "perfect little angel" and claimed a plot was underway, apparently missing that the tech industry itself is the one asking for oversight.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China.”

His own record cuts against him

Much of the second term went to brokering billion-dollar AI deals and stripping Biden-era AI and environmental rules. That all-gas narrative gets harder to sell as experts talk about misaligned models as near-inevitable.

Midterms and data centers

He already softened the line, saying he is not downplaying anything but it will be "more good than bad." Democrats are uniting behind a pause, and public anger at data center construction gives them a ready-made issue.

“I'm not downplaying. But it's going to be more good than bad, by a lot.”