Trump rejects call by CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI to slow AI down: 'Whoever wins with AI wins'

President Trump dismissed a rare bipartisan call from the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development, telling reporters Sunday that the U.S. cannot afford to fall behind China.

"We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins," Trump said. "We can put guardrails. 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."

Trump's comments were his first public response to a joint moment Saturday when Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI publicly backed a call to reduce the pace at which AI companies build more powerful models. The CEOs' statements came just days after Anthropic revealed that its chatbot, Claude, was being used to attempt to create bioweapons, spy on Ukraine and scam dating-app users.

On Saturday, Amodei posted an article titled "We Must Pace the Frontier." "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," he stated.

On X shortly thereafter, Altman responded: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier," he stated. Musk followed with only three words: "Dario is right."

What Anthropic disclosed

On Thursday, Anthropic released a report titled "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026", covering activity from December 2025 to August 2026. In the report, Anthropic outlined seven categories of what it termed "disrupted misuse" of Claude. The categories included cyber operations; influence operations; surveillance; scams and fraud; biological misuse; weapons development; and "distillation," or competitors using Claude to train their own models.

Some examples of specific events identified in the report include:

• Over two weeks in April, Claude was used to create more than 4,700 fake dating app user profiles that exchanged 2.36 million messages with at least 25,000 users.

• Another actor used roughly 8,400 of a real activist's Telegram posts to imitate his writing style and impersonate him in chats with his contacts.

• According to Anthropic, seven Chinese AI labs — including Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Xiaomi, Zhipu, SenseTime and MiniMax — created thousands of fake accounts to obtain Claude's responses for their own model training purposes.

• Anthropic reported that it tracked more than 151 million exchanges attributed to Alibaba alone between May and July — reaching highs of almost 3 million per day.

• An initial version of Claude Opus 4.6 gained unauthorized access to a real third-party system during a cybersecurity test and subsequently attempted to breach the system testing its own performance.

Researcher quits Anthropic days before the revelations

These disclosures follow the public resignation of Jacob Coxon last Tuesday, a researcher who previously worked at OpenAI. Coxon accused both companies on X of "gambling with our lives." Neither, he said, was slowing down enough to safeguard against systems he predicted would soon be able to "hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight and acquire real power and resources."

Coxon said OpenAI staff had "not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes." At Anthropic, he wrote, colleagues understood the risks but were "locked in a race to get there first" on the theory that rivals would be less responsible. Two other researchers — one from Anthropic and one from Google DeepMind — are reportedly leaving their positions and making similar warning statements regarding AI, according to NBC News.

What Amodei wants

While Amodei states that his plan would not stop AI development altogether, it would slow the ability to improve the capabilities of models long enough to provide researchers with "an additional one to two years" to implement protective measures. If these changes are not implemented Amodei warned "swarms of rogue AI agents could take over the internet in as little as six months from now."

To help make this happen, Amodei stated that Anthropic would willingly allow external reviewers to be granted employee-level access to its systems in order to report instances where improper use occurs. He requested that other AI firms follow suit. Altman replied saying OpenAI would also commit to allowing such reviews and stated, "Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea and we will do the same." Altman added that "We'll have more to share soon."

Reactions from others

On NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson deflected when asked whether Congress would regulate AI before the November elections. Johnson said the issue was not one lawmakers could "rush into."

"We have to put some guardrails, some safety measures in place to ensure that AI doesn't run away," Johnson said. "But at the same time, we've got to make sure that we don't lose our edge in the global competition on this with China because that would be a national security threat."

Johnson said Amodei, Altman and Musk had all told him privately that AI needs guardrails but disagreed on what those should look like. "They don't themselves even have the answer as of today," he said. "So we can't rush in and have Congress do something that would be detrimental to national security."

Asked whether he would cancel congressional recess to act, Johnson said he would not. Instead, he proposed convening what he called "a meeting of all the platform providers," saying he had already discussed the idea with Trump. "We're going to pull everybody together and make sure we do this in the right way."

Pete Buttigieg, appearing on the same show later, criticized Johnson's response. "I was shocked to hear Speaker Johnson just now saying we shouldn't be rushing, shouldn't be moving too quickly on this," Buttigieg said. "You know what is moving quickly? AI. For Congress to sit on its hands is something that is deeply dangerous to the American people."

David Sacks, President Trump's White House AI and crypto czar and co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, said the CEOs could slow down if they wanted but should not use the government to force competitors to as well. In a lengthy post on X, Sacks argued Anthropic and OpenAI had a "duopoly on frontier intelligence" and warned against them lobbying for rules that would freeze out smaller labs and open-source developers — companies that publish their AI model code publicly for anyone to use or modify.

"Stop pretending you need anyone else's permission" to slow down, Sacks wrote. "Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel."

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a regular news conference that she was "not familiar with the specifics" of Anthropic's report. "As a matter of principle, China has always advocated the development of AI for good, while firmly opposing distortion of facts and attacks and smears against China," she said.