Trump Completely Rejects AI “Experts” Push to ‘Pace the Frontier’
“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.”
Late last week, I argued that America cannot afford to let environmental-lawfare campaigns, spy-generated social media influence, and intellectual-property theft hand the Chinese Communist Party a substantial strategic advantage in developing artificial intelligence (AI).
The appropriate response to China’s meddling in US AI business is absolutely not naïve “cooperation,” but a serious commitment to securing our research, expanding reliable energy and data-center capacity, and treating China’s AI ambitions as the highly complex national-security challenge they plainly are.
It appears President Donald Trump agrees with me.
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.
I will simply note that this would not be the first time that China used our “experts” against us. Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the “coronavirus experts” implemented a great deal of destructive policy under the banners of science and safety.
"Experts" cited again. pic.twitter.com/tZeGnCZm1A
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) September 13, 2026
But more fiscally astute observers suggest an alternative explanation. Perhaps AI companies are facing slowing model gains, soaring compute and infrastructure costs, and growing public resistance to the data centers needed to sustain the race. Calls to slow development may therefore be as much about managing expectations, cutting spending, and rebuilding public support as about protecting humanity.
Let’s call this one the “Save the IPO” hypothesis.
An alternative hypothesis:
– model performance is plateauing
– compute is getting much more expensive
– AI data centers are massively unpopular
– slowing down AI development is a way to explain slowing progress, reduce spending, and try to regain some goodwill.
– This is an… https://t.co/H6gVTZtb0F— Nick Mark MD (@nickmmark) September 12, 2026
Anthropic is on the frontline of AI development, as is OpenAI. New regulations can be tailored to hinder the success of other firms that are a little less far along in development. And I will also note that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is one of Anthropic’s biggest customers, paying a $1.25 billion monthly fee for exclusive use of its Colossus cluster.
SpaceX just landed a mystery AI compute customer worth $1.11 BILLION per month.
The contract starts December 1 and joins reported deals worth $1.25B a month with Anthropic and $920M a month with Google.
That’s potentially $3.28B in monthly revenue from just three compute…
— Mark Kretschmann (@mark_k) September 13, 2026
Billions are on the line in being among the first “winners” in the AI race. Reuters reported that Anthropic projected as much as $18 billion in 2026 revenue and $55 billion in 2027 revenue. By comparison, OpenAI had passed a $25 billion annualized revenue rate by early 2026 but remained heavily investment-intensive, underscoring that immense sales do not automatically equal profits in an industry with substantial computing and infrastructure costs.
Fun fact #1: They both want to IPO. They both need to slash model training costs to show a path to profitability. An AI development slowdown serves exactly that purpose.
Fun fact #2: China has bridged the gap with the US. Any US slowdown would hand AI supremacy to China.
_ pic.twitter.com/kxEwZ4vH8s— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) September 12, 2026
Meanwhile, the White House AI Czar David Sacks says Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman already dominate frontier AI and therefore can voluntarily slow development if they believe their unreleased systems pose serious risks. He argues they should not use safety concerns to seek exemptions from antitrust rules, preemptive regulatory approval, or industry-controlled evaluation regimes, which he portrays as potential mechanisms for regulatory capture.
Sacks also added that a China-inclusive global slowdown is unlikely.
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
…So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier…
— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) September 13, 2026
It is clear Trump will not allow a small group of well-connected AI “experts” to convert speculative fears into a Washington-designed moat around their own market share.
A competitive free market paired with strong enforcement against Chinese espionage and theft will produce better technology and more resilient national security than regulatory capture masquerading as “safety.”
China benefits when America’s innovators are tied down by bureaucrats; the U.S. benefits when entrepreneurs remain free to compete, build, and win.
I am glad to see the current administration applying the lessons learned from COVID to protect American AI development.
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Comments
I guess it is best for OUR government and oligarchs to control our lives and use AI to fabricate incriminating evidence than having the Chinese do it.
Absolutely. Our government and oligarchs may enslave us. The CCP definitely will.
Griz – I don’t want to suggest that you’re an old man shouting at the clouds, but – the genie is already out of the bottle. A.I. is here. A.I. will stay. Trying to ban it is as useless as a caveman objecting that his enemy is cheating by throwing rocks when they fight.
Oh, I don’t want it banned. Far from it. I am getting a lot of use out of typing in human-readable thoughts to search engines and getting amazing responses.
It’s like cameras everywhere. They have caught a lot of Bad Guys. I run a dash cam in my car due to all the nuts on the road combined with my age. I’d likely get blamed for a questionable wreck because ‘his reflexes aren’t what they were blah blah’. But, cams are being abused by cops stalking women (or men!), or there is just the creepy factor.
My point is that as beneficial as AI can be, it is and will be in The Wrong Hands and be very hard to counteract.
Nope, no cloud-shouting here…
yet! ;-{)}}}
Agreed the toothpaste is out of the tube. What we need to do with both AI and Flock at their point is ignore the luddite dream of getting rid of either. Instead we should focus on who gets to use them, for what purposes, how is it monitored, who watches the watchers and establish severe consequences for misuse. If some goon LEO is accessing Flock data to stalk their ex or a neighbor that should be public knowledge. Demand an audit log released each quarter so the public can see if Officer Friendly is misusing his access. Set automatic penalties both civil and criminal based on the evidence of the log. No whining that someone ‘stole your PW’ and ‘it wasn’t me’ b/c you’re still responsible to safeguard it.
Better yet restrict access to a centralized location like at the County dispatch with maybe 3 people who have access each with separate credentials. That keeps street cops honest and allows much more focused use of the data with an easy audit trail.
AI could be similar. These AI providers can review who is allowed to use their product and for what purposes. Set a specific contact. Limit access ability to a small # of users of that contract. Monitor their usage. If they violate the contract terms end their access. Have Feds on speed dial with specific legislation to address potential misuse reported to them.
We can kick and scream all we want but both Flock and AI are useful tools that can’t be uninvented.
We need to dominate and not allow the Chinese to surpass us. Good call DJT.
Something further I would like to see done – either by DJT or someone else – is to call out companies with American mailing addresses (formerly known as “American companies) fined, tariffed or otherwise brought to heel for sending their research or engineering to China.
GM just signed on another multiyear (I think 20) with SAIC in China. Wait until they come begging for their next bailout. They thanked the American people for the first one by moving more production overseas, along with engineering. And on that second one, it shows.
Maybe set the bailout interest rate for any bailout at same % as their overseas share of product engineering. With an added kicker of handing the Treasury a % of their common stock = to the % of their product not manufactured in the USA.
Or we COULD just let the iron hand of the free market prevail and if competitors drive them out of business, or their own stupidity in making products consumers reject or b/c consumers got wise to their assembled in USA v manufactured in USA games or any other rason then so be it. Companies get the opportunity to succeed AND to fail. Same with the stock markets, they should go up AND down without govt intervention to prop them up.
Oldest rule of thumb in tech no one likes to admit. If a technology is good, the porn industry and/or gaming will be the early adopters and push the envelope.
While there has been some uptick and push on the porn side, it hasn’t turned the industry upside down. Gaming… jack squat. Video games are worse now than 30 years ago.
Absolutely. I worked in a very early internet company. One of products was a payment system and when we looked at our customers many of those were sin based companies.
Playboy was also a customer.
If you check around porn sites are heavy users of AI now,
The only game I ever downloaded to my iphone was Pong. It stopped working properly after an OS update. Deleted it after that.
You can and SHOULD blame a lot of the current gaming junk that the big boys are putting out on DEI/feminists/HR getting in the way. Just like they helped kill hollywood, they are killing games. Too violent, too male, wrong bad guys, wrong story, too much objectification, not inclusive enough, etc.
You have to move to second and third tier and indi-games to find good fun games. They might not have the polish of tier one publishers but they do have fun.
The ones the government picks will do fine.
If anyone hasn’t watched “Silicon Valley,” they absolutely were spot-on in their predictions about pretty much every tech development we are seeing today, and will likely see in the future.
My beef with AI is that it yields less than 1% benefit as it drains the battery in my phone.
What Trump will ‘allow” is irrelevant. Musk, Thiel, et al., have already written the legislation that will give them and their buddies the total monopoly on the technology. Then they will dump the Republicans and slide back into bed with the Democrats and the Intelligence agencies the way they did ten years ago.
AI will warp the future generation’s view of the world ten fold over that of television. Government control will be inevitable simply because of that.