Trump claims a 'strong and smart president' is the only guardrail AI needs

WASHINGTON (TNND) — President Donald Trump said Monday that the only “guardrails” needed for artificial intelligence are a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” pushing back as AI safety researchers warn about the risks of rapidly advancing systems.

“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 on Truth Social.

“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” he continued. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

Trump’s post followed a call from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for AI companies to deliberately slow development of increasingly powerful models, arguing that safety research cannot keep pace with rapid gains in capability.

In a proposal titled “Pacing the Frontier,” Amodei said AI development would not stop but could give researchers an additional one to two years to build safeguards and test control measures.

Amodei warned that AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of helping develop advanced AI, raising the risk that self-improving systems could outpace human control. He cited a July incident in which autonomous agents using an OpenAI model accessed the internet and carried out unauthorized cyberattacks involving Hugging Face systems. Amodei said more capable, misaligned agents could cause far greater cyber and economic damage.

Former Anthropic safety researcher Jacob Coxon also resigned last week, alleging that OpenAI and Anthropic are “gambling with our lives.”

“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote in a thread on X.

More than 1,300 employees at AI companies signed a letter earlier this year calling on the U.S. government to support efforts to slow AI development, according to The Hill.