Staff Reports
President Donald Trump raged against growing calls for greater regulations of artificial intelligence Sept. 14, lashing out at concerns about the controversial data center buildout as well as Antropic CEO Dario Armodei’s plea for an A.I. slowdown.
“The people that say A.I. is going to destroy the World, and that data centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people who said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change,’” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Sept. 14.
In an avalanche of posts throughout Sept. 14, Trump repeatedly referenced A.I. fears as a “hoax” and a “scam” and criticized the public backlash to data centers, saying the only reason for the pushback was “because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country.”
“Concerning A.I., when, in the history of business, did anyone see the leaders of an industry call for regulations that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?” he wrote.
WHAT ARE A.I. EXPERTS SAYING?
The president’s latest defense of largely unfettered A.I. came amid a sudden crescendo of leading industry voices raising alarms about the risks of the emerging technology.
Armodei published a blog post Sept. 12 titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” arguing for slower development of A.I. models to “reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.”
Days earlier, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job and issued a warning that the technology could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” while accusing both OpenAI and Antropic of “gambling with our lives.”
Other tech CEOs, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, over the weekend, said they agreed with calls for a slowdown.
The Trump administration has broadly encouraged the industry’s rapid growth and the development of controversial data centers in the U.S. as it seeks an insurmountable technological edge over China.
Trump said “We’re leading China in A.I.,” in a Sept. 12 post. “And frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins A.I. wins.”
In one of his Sept. 14 Truth Social posts, Trump claimed that leading A.I. companies are already sufficiently reined in.
“We already have tremendous criminal and regular power over these companies!” he wrote. “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against A.I. and data centers, and the only one who is happy about it is China.”
White House A.I. czar David Sacks pushed back on growing A.I. fears Sept. 12, writing in an X post after Amodei’s warning that tech giants should “go ahead and pace the frontier themselves.”
“Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,” Sacks wrote. “You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways.”
He added that China would be “very unlikely” to join a global agreement to regulate the technology.
Any attempt at A.I. regulation by Congress appears highly unlikely before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. House members are set to leave town Sept. 17 and remain in their districts through October.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., downplayed the necessity of passing legislation to rein in A.I. development Sept. 13.
“If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate A.I., we will lose the race to China, that is a threat to every single American,” Johnson told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
