US President Donald Trump pushed back on growing calls for tighter regulation of artificial intelligence on Monday, saying the United States already had safeguards to regulate and prosecute AI companies as industry leaders warned of the risks posed by increasingly powerful models.
"The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG and SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" Trump wrote on Truth Social, arguing that doubts about US AI development could benefit China.
Trump’s comments came after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned partly because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."
AI-related stocks fell worldwide on Monday after leaders of some of the industry’s biggest companies called for a slower pace of development.
Vice President JD Vance separately expressed scepticism about AI executives seeking government regulation of the sector.
"I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them," Vance told reporters.
Trump described the industry's call for regulation as a "hoax".
Amodei, meanwhile, called for mandatory independent audits of the most advanced AI systems, known as frontier models, in an essay published on Saturday.
He proposed a three-step framework aimed at slowing the pace of AI development and giving governments and industry more time to manage its risks. The proposal was endorsed by several other major AI executives, including Elon Musk, who runs xAI, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Reuters reported on Monday that three US senators are working on legislation that would require AI companies to demonstrate that they are taking reasonable precautions to prevent their tools from causing harm, although the details remain under discussion.
US House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters he expected Trump to meet AI executives this week or "early next week", with discussions expected to focus on "the responsibilities of the companies to maintain safety and what role, if any, the government has to play in that."
US Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and technology policy leader, also spoke with Amodei and Altman about AI safety concerns over the weekend, his spokesperson said.
At the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said companies could voluntarily slow or pace their AI development if they believed their operations were getting out of control.
"There's just a whole bunch of stuff: pausing, pacing. Those are all voluntary things that they could do if they feel that their company is out of control," Huang said.
Huang also took a phone call from Trump during the event and put him on speaker for the audience. During the roughly five-minute call, Trump said data centres make people and states wealthy, describing them as the "oil of the next 20, 25 years".
Trump is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington next week. Reuters previously reported that the two countries were planning a separate meeting in mid-September between lower-level government officials to discuss AI risks. - September 14, 2026
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