Trump Says He’s the Only AI ‘Guardrail’ Needed and Mocks Anthropic CEO’s Call for AI Slowdown: ‘Pretending to Be a Perfect Little Angel’

After the CEOs of AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI this weekend issued calls for the industry to slow development over safety concerns, President Donald Trump weighed in the topic — downplaying the need for any protections in AI tech development other than himself.

“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! The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ – and we will continue to do so!” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social account Monday.

Trump continued: “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! 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! Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

His comments came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday, Sept. 12, posted a 3,815-word essay online warning about the dangers of AI. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. Amodei also said this: “I won’t lie to you — there are real dangers. And I think for too long the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.”

A few hours after Amodei shared his essay, OpenAI Sam Altman posted a statement agreeing that a slowdown was necessary.

“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks,” Altman wrote in a post on X. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”