Trump dismisses the AI-pacing chorus: "the only guardrail AI needs" is him
Two days after Amodei, Altman, Musk and Hassabis all backed some version of slowing frontier AI development, Trump used Truth Social to reject regulation and call the safety concerns a "SICK conspiracy."
On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier," calling for the industry to deliberately slow capability gains -- and within days, OpenAI's Sam Altman, xAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis had each publicly backed some version of the idea (Merit AC covered the essay and the initial Altman/Musk reactions separately). On September 14, President Trump responded on Truth Social, rejecting the entire premise: the only guardrail AI needs, he wrote, is "a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT."
Naming Amodei directly
Trump's post singled out Anthropic's CEO by name, claiming his administration had already reined in bad actors in AI and casting Amodei's pacing call as performative rather than genuine. He framed the broader safety push as a coordinated, bad-faith campaign against the industry and data centers, tied it directly to competition with China, and said the U.S. is currently ahead and intends to stay there.
What it doesn't change
The post is a rejection of new federal guardrails, not a change to any existing rule -- Trump's own text asserts the administration already has broad criminal and regulatory power over AI companies, without specifying what that power is or how it's been used. For an industry where Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind's leaders had just spent two days converging, awkwardly, on the idea that they should be reined in by outside evaluators, the loudest answer from Washington so far is that no outside constraint is needed at all.