Trump and Mike Johnson think the AI industry is overreacting

Details

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy open letter calling for AI labs to 'pace the frontier' and slow development. OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk publicly backed the proposal on X, while Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis offered tentative support — a rare cross-company alignment from the industry's most prominent executives on an AI safety position. President Trump pushed back sharply, telling the Financial Times: 'Look, we're leading China in AI... and whoever wins AI, wins.' House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN's Jake Tapper that emergency regulation would be a 'national security threat' and urged against panic, arguing that rushing to restrict AI would cost the US its lead over China. The divergence crystallizes the central AI policy fault line for fall 2026: the industry's top CEOs calling for restraint versus the White House and House leadership framing any slowdown as geopolitically dangerous. With both Trump and Johnson aligned against restrictions, near-term federal AI legislation faces steep political headwinds regardless of the industry consensus. The article records political statements rather than formal proposals or legislation. The underlying Amodei letter is not reproduced here; what 'pacing the frontier' would actually require in practice remains unclear from this source alone.