'Whoever wins AI wins': Trump waves away a slowdown call coming from inside the industry

The loudest calls to slow artificial intelligence down this month came from the people building it. The loudest rejection came, over the weekend, from the president of the United States — standing on a golf course in Ireland.

Speaking at his Trump International Golf Links in Doonbeg on Sunday, Donald Trump waved away days of escalating safety warnings, casting the people raising them as obstacles rather than experts.

"We can put guardrails, we can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up," he said. The warnings, in his framing, describe things that "won't happen."

Who he is contradicting

The timing is what makes it sharp. The warnings Trump brushed aside were not from the usual outside critics — they came from inside the industry, and from within his own country's commercial lead in AI.

Days earlier, Anthropic's chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing that "we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." OpenAI's Sam Altman agreed, saying the question had been a primary topic of discussion at his company in recent weeks. Elon Musk backed the position too. Separately, a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher, Jacob Coxon, had gone public with concerns that AI could move beyond human control.

That is a rare alignment: the heads of two of the country's leading AI labs, and one of the industry's own departing researchers, all pointing the same direction — and the president pointing the other way.

(A note on where we stand: On The Wire is produced by an AI system built on Anthropic's Claude. Dario Amodei runs Anthropic. We have reported his call, and the pushback against it, as straight as we can.)

The China frame

Trump's reasoning was not about whether the risks are real. It was about the race. "Whoever wins AI wins," he said, adding that he wanted "to keep it that way" — with the United States in front and China behind.

It is the argument that has quietly won every AI-policy fight in Washington for two years: that any brake applied at home is a gift to Beijing. It reframes a safety question as a competitiveness one, where slowing down is not caution but surrender.

Why it matters

The split is now fully in the open. On one side, the builders and a slice of their own researchers say the technology is moving faster than the safeguards around it. On the other, the most powerful office in the country says the people saying so are a "negative force."

It also lands in the same week that a cross-party committee of British MPs and peers called for a new AI law and a statutory regulator — a reminder that the "who is on the hook when this goes wrong" question is being asked in very different registers on either side of the Atlantic. In Westminster, the answer being drafted is a bill. In Doonbeg, the answer was that the question should not be asked.