President Donald Trump on Monday raged against growing calls for greater regulation of artificial intelligence, lashing out at concerns about the controversial data center buildout as well as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s plea for an AI slowdown.
“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change,'” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Monday afternoon.
In his sixth post about AI on Monday, Trump called himself the “Hoax Buster.”
“I’m right now breaking another Hoax — That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!” he wrote.
In an avalanche of posts throughout Monday, Trump repeatedly referenced AI fears as a “hoax” and a “scam” and lambasted the public backlash to data centers, saying the only reason for the pushback was “because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country.”
“Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?” he wrote.
The president’s latest defense of largely unfettered AI growth came amid a sudden crescendo of leading industry voices raising alarms about the risks of the nascent technology.
On Saturday, Amodei published a blog post titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” arguing for slower development of AI models to “reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.”
Days earlier, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job and issued a warning that the technology could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” while accusing both OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives.”
Other tech CEOs, including OpenAI chief Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, over the weekend said they agreed with calls for a slowdown. Following Coxon’s viral warnings, Altman reportedly met backstage with Trump at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on Thursday, according to a Monday report by MS NOW, citing three people familiar with the meeting.
The Trump administration has broadly encouraged the industry’s rapid growth and the development of controversial data centers in the U.S. as it seeks an insurmountable technological edge over China.
Trump on Saturday said, “We’re leading China in AI.”
“And frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins,” the president said.
In one of his Truth Social posts on Monday, Trump claimed that leading AI companies are already sufficiently reined in.
“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” he wrote. “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China.”
“WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!” he added.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s post.
White House AI czar David Sacks on Saturday pushed back on growing AI fears, writing in an X post after Amodei’s warning that tech giants should “go ahead and pace the frontier” themselves.
“Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,” Sacks wrote. “You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways.”
He added that China would be “very unlikely” to join a global agreement to regulate the technology.
Any attempt at AI regulation by Congress appears highly unlikely before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. House members are set to leave town Thursday and remain in their districts through October.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Sunday downplayed the necessity of passing legislation to rein in AI development.
“If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, that is a threat to every single American,” Johnson told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“We don’t need everybody to panic right now, we need to handle this new technology like we have others in the past, and make sure we’re doing everything we can responsibly to also not smother American innovation,” he said.
— CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
