Trump, Johnson push back on AI executives' slowdown call — SkimNews
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- Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, published a lengthy open letter calling on the industry to "pace the frontier" and slow down AI development
- Sam Altman (OpenAI), Elon Musk, and Alphabet's Demis Hassabis publicly backed Amodei's proposal on X, with Hassabis offering tentative support
- Donald Trump told the Financial Times: "we're leading China in AI ... and, frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins," framing AI dominance as a zero-sum geopolitical contest
- House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN's Jake Tapper that rushing to place restrictions on AI development could be a "national security threat"
- Johnson urged calm and warned that if Congress rushed into an emergency session to regulate AI, "we will lose the race to China"
Why it matters: The article surfaces a rare alignment of rival frontier-AI leaders — Amodei, Altman, Musk, and Hassabis — all publicly backing a slowdown, directly contradicted by Republican political leadership. Johnson's explicit warning against emergency AI legislation signals Congress is unlikely to act quickly on safety concerns regardless of industry consensus, leaving the China-frame as the operative political lens on AI regulation.
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