Darlene Superville and Didi TangUpdated September 14, 2026 — 7:20am,first published 10:18amPresident Donald Trump played down the need for his administration to check the development of artificial intelligence, saying he worried about ceding America’s edge over China in a global competition and that winning would help address the risks from the advancing technology.While acknowledging the need for some regulation, Trump provided no specifics about potential rules and attributed warnings about the technology moving too quickly and with little oversight to “negative forces” he did not identify, though industry pioneers have raised such concerns.“Whoever wins with AI wins”: US President Donald Trump.Getty Images“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 told reporters during a weekend trip to Ireland. “But whoever wins with AI wins.”Asked by a reporter if the industry should slow down or be regulated, Trump said after watching a golfer tee off in the Irish Open at his resort in Doonbeg that the United States is leading China in the development of AI and “frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.”Chinese President Xi Jinping is due at the White House later in September to meet with Trump, and AI likely will be among the items they discuss.The Republican president spoke a day after Dario Amodei, CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, said the industry should put the brakes on its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Other tech leaders, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, publicly agreed with Amodei.Amodei issued a lengthy blog post on Saturday, saying his company would implement new safety steps, such as third-party evaluators, while calling on the industry to support a broader downshift.OpenAI chief Sam Altman quickly pledged to adopt Amodei’s suggestion of “independent evaluators with employee-like access”, while Elon Musk, who runs xAI Corp, wrote, “Dario is right”.While all three leaders have over the years warned of the risks of AI, an actual co-ordinated slowdown has little precedent in a cutthroat industry that has historically cranked out one product after another in the name of boosting user engagement, grabbing market share and striving for sales gains.But the anxiety about severe AI risks has begun to enter the mainstream, driven in part by last week’s high-profile resignation of an Anthropic researcher over existential fears that his company was acting irresponsibly.It’s unclear how far the leading AI companies – which are fierce rivals themselves and also face stiff competition from Chinese firms – will go in imposing new limits or safety checks.Dario Amodei said the tech industry “must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models”.BloombergAmodei cited two main factors for his new caution: AI’s ability to improve itself and the recent incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face, where a swarm of AI agents collaborated to breach a third-party website.“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote in a blog post on Saturday. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”Throughout the AI boom, executives at the leading AI labs have warned about potential existential risks – claims that have sometimes been dismissed as attempts to market the capabilities of their products and position themselves as the best stewards for the technology. Amodei himself has previously said there’s a 25 per cent chance things go “really, really badly”.Anthropic has long positioned itself as being focused on developing AI more responsibly and safely to mitigate the technology’s potential dangers and maximise the societal benefits.The company took pains earlier this year to limit the release of its Mythos model after determining it posed unique cybersecurity threats. Anthropic has also previously said the world needs a system to collectively decide when to slow work on the technology.At the same time, Anthropic has remained locked in a fierce competition with long-time rival OpenAI to build increasingly sophisticated models that can automate more complex and valuable tasks for business customers. The two firms have both filed confidential paperwork to go public, with Anthropic expected to make its Wall Street debut as soon as this year.OpenAI’s Altman said this year would be an “ill-advised moment” to go public, telling Fortune in an interview published on Saturday that a listing would not take place until 2027. “I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10 per cent chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade,” he added.Growing alarmEarlier this week, Altman said his company was considering slowing down the development of cutting-edge AI, preferably in conjunction with the broader industry.The company’s top scientist, Jakub Pachocki, had posted a warning about the dangers of AI, saying that he believes companies should be “coordinating to slow down future development as needed”.On Tuesday, Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher, quit his job and accused both of his former employers – Anthropic and OpenAI – of “gambling with our lives” by racing toward superintelligent AI. Coxon said in a social media post that the people building AI believe it could “kill us all by the end of the decade”.In response, Evan Hubinger, a current Anthropic employee, said he and others at the company do worry about this scenario. “I personally think it is >10 per cent within the next decade,” he wrote on X.Back in July, more than 1000 staffers across top AI firms signed a petition calling on the US government to support a mechanism that would help “deliberately pace” AI development to prevent the technology from advancing too fast.AI models are proving increasingly adept at carrying out their own hacks, with Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta Platforms all disclosing in recent months that their models had escaped testing environments, accessed the open internet and breached real-world victims during testing.Amodei, in his post, wrote that a co-ordinated strategy would allow AI industry leaders in the US to complete needed safety work without sacrificing any competitive advantage. He said that this would require some antitrust exemptions in the US to allow companies to co-ordinate in specific areas, as well as co-operation with China.“If we greatly restrain our AI capabilities in the belief that China will do the same, and then China defects, AI could be so powerful that such a defection could lead to their geopolitical dominance,” he wrote.AP, BloombergThe Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.More:AIElon MuskSam AltmanAnthropicTrump's White HouseDonald TrumpFrom our partners