Trump rejects the AI slowdown: "whoever wins AI, wins"

The companies building frontier AI asked to slow down. Within a day, the answer from Washington was no, in one sentence: “whoever wins AI, wins.”

What Trump said

On September 13, 2026, speaking to reporters at his Doonbeg golf resort in Ireland, President Trump said the warnings about AI were overstated and blamed “negative forces” for raising them. He said the US is leading China in AI and that he wants to keep it that way.

The timing made the remark an answer. A day earlier, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had published an essay calling for AI companies and governments to pace AI development, and both OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk said they agreed, a rare public alignment of three rival labs.

The pushback beyond the president

David Sacks, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, answered the labs directly on X: “So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it.” He added that demanding their preferred regulation in exchange “will look like blackmail of the public and the political system.”

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez went after the structure of the proposal rather than the pace. In a blog post, he called the labs’ plan “a cartel by any other name,” an arrangement in which the largest incumbents would write the rules the rest of the industry has to live under.

Where that leaves the slowdown

The labs asked for coordination, and the government told them to act alone. For now, any pacing of frontier AI development looks likely to depend on voluntary commitments from the companies themselves rather than new US rules, which means each lab decides how much speed it is willing to give up while its competitors decide the same.