AI Chiefs Call for Slowdown; Trump Team Pushes Back — SkimNews
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- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Saturday calling on the US government to regulate AI companies and enable competitors to collaborate on safety standards without breaching antitrust law, and also requested international coordination including with the Chinese Communist Party.
- OpenAI's Sam Altman, Elon Musk (owner of Grok), and Microsoft's Satya Nadella endorsed Amodei's call to slow AI development, according to the article, marking a rare public alignment among rival lab leaders after a week of safety concerns.
- David Sacks, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, fired back on X telling labs to slow down themselves, writing "stop pretending you need anyone else's permission" and rejecting the antitrust waiver request as forming "a cartel."
- President Trump dismissed AI concerns during an Ireland visit as raised by "very negative forces" and declared "whoever wins AI, wins," insisting the US currently leads China and should preserve that edge.
- House Speaker Mike Johnson warned on CNN that emergency AI regulation would cause the US to "lose the race to China," calling it "a threat to every single American."
- OpenAI's Altman committed Sunday night to Amodei's proposal for embedded third-party evaluators with employee-level access to verify safety practices, writing that "pacing will be well worth this cost" despite the "significant costs."
Why it matters: With the Trump administration framing any regulatory slowdown as ceding the AI race to China, coordinated government action is effectively off the table and the burden of "pacing" shifts to voluntary corporate measures — specifically, the third-party evaluator scheme Altman just agreed to. The practical gatekeeper of AI safety in the US is now an industry self-promise, not a regulator, and Sacks's accusation of cartel-building makes antitrust-protected coordination unlikely.
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