# Washington splits hard over AI risk

> A resignation letter and a doomsday number split Silicon Valley and Washington into two camps that nobody saw coming.
- Title: Washington splits hard over AI risk · CNBC | Shortify
- Summary: A resignation letter and a doomsday number split Silicon Valley and Washington into two camps that nobody saw coming. The AI safety fight is no longer lab…
- Keywords: ai safety, regulation, trump, anthropic, openai, business, finance, Washington, splits, hard, risk, CNBC
- Source: CNBC — https://cnbc.com/2026/09/15/ai-regulation-trump-nvidia-openai-anthropic.html
- Author: Samantha Subin
- Published: 2026-09-15T20:05:32+00:00
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: ai safety, regulation, trump, anthropic, openai, business, finance
## Two camps, strange bedfellows
A warning about humanity's odds has split Washington and Silicon Valley into sides that cut straight across old rivalries and party lines.

> Two distinct camps have emerged.
## Who stands where
Trump, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and former crypto czar David Sacks on one side. Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk on the other, with AI researchers behind them.
## A resignation lit the fuse
Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit last week, saying the labs were gambling with people's lives. An Anthropic alignment lead then put the odds of AI killing everyone above 10%.

> gambling with our lives
## Rivals agree to slow down
Amodei called for the frontier to slow model development. Altman backed him, an odd pairing for two competing labs, and Musk posted that Dario is right.

> sounding the alarm on AI for a long time
## Sanders and Bannon, same room
Bernie Sanders, Rep. Chip Roy and Steve Bannon showed up at the same Washington nonprofit event on Tuesday, all pushing for AI action.
## Trump calls it a hoax
Across several Truth Social posts, Trump labeled runaway AI fears a hoax and a scam, and hit back at local pushback on data centers.

> You're not all going to be dead in 10 years. That's a hoax.
## Huang wants no new rules
Trump phoned into Huang's All-In Summit interview to press the case. At Dreamforce, Huang said plainly that no new laws or regulations are needed.

> We don't need any new laws. We don't need new regulations.
## China is the argument
The administration frames light regulation as the way to beat China, and casts slowdown talk as a funded scare campaign. Trump plans to gather AI leaders at the White House within the week.

> whoever wins AI wins
## Key takeaway

The AI safety fight is no longer lab versus lab. It is frontier lab leaders and odd-couple politicians pushing for a slowdown, against a White House that calls the whole fear a hoax.