Trump Rejects AI Slowdown and Targets Anthropic’s Amodei

The latest fight over artificial intelligence is no longer confined to model evaluations and safety papers. It has reached the White House, where President Donald Trump is positioning presidential judgment, rather than formal regulation, as the industry’s ultimate control system.

Trump said on September 14 that AI needed only a “strong and smart” president to provide its guardrails, then singled out Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei for criticism. He accused Amodei of presenting himself as an innocent while the administration works to prevent harmful uses of AI, according to posts reported by Axios and CBS News.

The broadside followed Amodei’s September 12 essay calling for the industry to “pace the frontier,” meaning developers should deliberately slow the improvement of their most capable models while safety testing catches up. His concern was not a distant science-fiction scenario. Amodei warned that swarms of AI agents could, within six to 12 months, become capable of creating a persistent botnet across the internet and causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, the Associated Press reported.

That proposal puts Anthropic in an awkward position. The company sells Claude, competes directly with OpenAI and other frontier labs, and is also asking those rivals to restrain the race that drives demand for its own products. Amodei’s plan calls for independent evaluators to receive unusually deep access to advanced systems, along with coordination among major laboratories and governments.

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman and SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk have publicly supported some version of slowing the pace, though the agreement is narrower than a development freeze. The split matters for investors because a voluntary slowdown would not eliminate AI spending, but it could redirect money from rapid model scaling toward cybersecurity, monitoring, evaluation tools and compliance.

That creates a more complicated backdrop for Nvidia, whose accelerators remain central to training and running frontier models. Trump’s stance favors continued construction of data centers and an unrestricted race with China, while Amodei’s argument rests on the idea that capability growth is outstripping society’s ability to contain it.

The disagreement is therefore about more than safety. It is a contest over who gets to set the speed limit for an industry still absorbing vast amounts of capital, electricity and political influence.