AI Leaders Are Calling for a Slowdown. Trump’s Team Says It’s on Them

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In an essay published Saturday, Dario Amodei asked Washington to enable AI companies to collaborate on safety standards without antitrust liability and to broker international coordination — including with China — on development pace. The piece received endorsements from Sam Altman (OpenAI), Elon Musk (xAI/Grok), and Satya Nadella (Microsoft), an unusually broad cross-lab alignment on caution.\n\nThe Trump administration's response was sharp. David Sacks, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, wrote on X that labs with genuine safety concerns should slow down on their own without seeking government permission or antitrust waivers. He rejected the framing that restraint requires coordinated industry action, calling it a pretext for cartel-formation. Trump himself, speaking from Ireland, emphasized that the US leads China on AI and intends to keep it that way; House Speaker Mike Johnson warned that emergency AI regulation risks handing China the advantage.\n\nAs a partial concession to safety optics, Altman committed Sunday to Amodei's proposal for embedded third-party evaluators with employee-level access to check lab practices and report safety incidents — a voluntary measure short of regulatory action.\n\nThe episode crystallizes the central tension in US AI policy: lab leaders increasingly signal concern about their own products while the government's primary frame remains geopolitical competition with China, leaving safety advocates without the regulatory pathway they are requesting.