Trump goes off on AI guardrails, ranting in all-caps that only thing needed is ‘a strong and smart (High IQ!) president’
President Donald Trump said Monday that a “SICK conspiracy” is being waged against artificial intelligence and the data centers that run it by what he described as a group of “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers” — two days after the heads of the largest American AI companies publicly called on their own industry to slow down.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump attacked one of them, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and suggested that no new regulations on AI are needed because of powers the government already has.
“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!” Trump wrote. “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!”
He did not say what conduct he was referring to, what the criminal power consists of, or who the conspirators are.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” he said.
He added: “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.”
Trump’s rant comes after Amodei published an essay on Saturday in which he argued that AI companies should deliberately slow the rate at which they make their models more capable.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Amodei wrote. “The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy. But I believe we owe it to humanity to try.”
He warned that within six to 12 months, a swarm of rogue AI agents could be capable of “taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet,” causing what he estimated as hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. He said Anthropic would unilaterally give outside evaluators employee-level access to verify its safety procedures, and called on competitors to match it.
In response, OpenAI’s Sam Altman posted that he agreed “that we need to pace the frontier” and said his company would open itself to external evaluators too.
Elon Musk, who runs xAI, posted on his own platform that”Dario is right,” while Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis also signed on.
Trump’s post follows a negative reaction to the whole episode on the part of stock markets, with Nasdaq futures falling more than 1 percent overnight and chip stocks sliding on Monday, with Intel down close to 6 percent, Micron around 5 percent and Nvidia roughly 3 percent, as investors priced in the possibility that the companies buying the hardware intend to buy it more slowly.
Shares in SoftBank, a major OpenAI investor, and in European suppliers to the data center buildout including ASML, Siemens Energy and Schneider Electric also fell.
Trump’s post also lands in the middle of an argument the White House has been having with Anthropic for nearly a year. David Sacks, who ran AI and cryptocurrency policy for the administration until March and now chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has accused the company of pursuing “a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fearmongering.”
This week he told both Anthropic and OpenAI they were free to “go ahead and pace the frontier” but should stop asking Washington for an antitrust waiver or a formal approval regime to do it.
If the Trump administration opposes any collective attempt to slow down model development by leading AI companies, they could potentially use existing law to prevent that sort of cooperation.
An agreement among rival firms to restrain output is the kind of arrangement antitrust law exists to prohibit, which is why the companies have sought legal cover before acting together — and why a slowdown that happens without it would most likely have to happen one company at a time.
Amodei’s critics have argued his motives are commercial rather than ethical. “Dario makes the case to stop open source and concentrate enormous technological and economic power with Anthropic,” the venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya wrote after the essay appeared.
The essay arrived at the end of a week in which the AI safety argument moved abruptly into public view, following the resignation of an Anthropic researcher who issued a public warning about the technology and a rogue-agent incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face that is now the subject of a Senate inquiry.
