Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I.

 

Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I.

 

The president again rejected calls to try to regulate the industry, even as some of its leaders are speaking more openly about the risks of rapidly developing artificial intelligence.

 

Jonathan SwanMichael Gold

By Jonathan Swan and Michael Gold

Sept. 14, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/us/politics/trump-ai-regulation-anthropic-dario-amodei.html

 

President Trump on Monday rejected calls from leading artificial intelligence executives for new limits on the technology, writing on social media that the industry already has the only guardrail it needs: “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”

 

He dismissed safety concerns as a “hoax” that would give China the upper hand in developing the technology. He argued that “the people that say AI is going to destroy the World” are the same ones warning about climate change — which he also insists is a hoax.

 

With the posts, Mr. Trump inserted himself into an intensifying national debate over how to govern a rapidly evolving technology. Researchers and industry leaders warn it could bring mass unemployment, a new wave of biological weapons and autonomous warfare. The president did not address those risks directly. Instead, he questioned the sincerity of the executives who have been calling to slow the technology’s development.

 

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Mr. Trump posted on Monday morning. “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ — and we will continue to do so!

 

“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” he added.

 

It was not clear what authority Mr. Trump was referring to, or what actions he believes his administration has already blocked. The United States does have laws in place to prosecute deliberate hacking into other systems, but it is not clear that rogue A.I. agents’ hacking into networks would be covered by a law designed to go after human hackers.

 

Similarly, as the companies go public, they will be subject to regulations that govern publicly traded firms in the United States. But generally the industry is subject to very little existing regulation.

 

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Mr. Trump’s own grasp of the technology is superficial, according to people close to him. He is an extreme late adopter of tech: He began text messaging only in 2022, and his staff prints out social media posts for him to read.

 

The president’s statement followed a weekend essay from Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, calling for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development. Days earlier, one of Anthropic’s researchers quit and went public over his fears about the safety of the technology.

 

The Trump administration has clashed with Anthropic before. Earlier this year, the company refused to give the Pentagon unfettered access to its A.I. system without safeguards it wanted. Mr. Trump then ordered the federal government to stop using Anthropic’s A.I. technology and labeled the company a security risk, a designation that a federal judge later ruled was unlawful.

 

Other A.I. chiefs have voiced concerns of their own in recent days. Demis Hassabis, the chairman of Google DeepMind; Elon Musk of SpaceX; and Sam Altman of OpenAI have all endorsed calls for a slower pace.

 

Vice President JD Vance has repeated the president’s warnings about China leaping ahead and has also echoed Mr. Trump’s skepticism about A.I. company executives’ calls for their own regulation. But he has also described certain uses of artificial intelligence as “satanic” and has been more open about his concerns regarding the technology’s risks.

 

“It’s something that we’re concerned by, but we want to make sure that we regulate smartly,” Mr. Vance told a reporter on Monday morning before leaving for an event in Kansas City. “There are obviously risks to A.I.; there are benefits to A.I. I have to say, personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that we have so many frontier A.I. tech companies kind of talking to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse, so I think we just have to be careful about this.”

 

“Any technology has risks,” he added, saying later, “I think what the president has said is we want to be smart about making sure we stay on top of those risks.” The best approach, he said, would be “consensus between both Congress and the administration.”

 

Speaker Mike Johnson has shared Mr. Trump’s warnings that China could overtake the United States, but he has been more open to congressional action. Over the weekend, he urged a cautious approach to regulation and said executives of the leading A.I. companies should take part in any talks about a federal framework. On Monday he told reporters at the Capitol that he hoped to convene such a meeting as soon as the end of next week, though he would not commit to a date. “It will be soon,” he said.

 

Though Mr. Johnson has called A.I. regulation a top priority for Congress, lawmakers have done little. Under his leadership, the House passed a provision in the sweeping tax cuts and domestic policy bill that would have blocked states from writing their own A.I. rules. It drew bipartisan opposition, and the Senate stripped it.

 

That legislation, which Mr. Trump calls his “big, beautiful bill,” also expanded major tax breaks for research costs, new investment and rural development projects. Those provisions benefit artificial intelligence players looking to build new data centers, invest in chip-making facilities and increase their power supply.

 

On Monday, Democrats rejected Mr. Trump’s position on A.I. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called for Congress to pass legislation on the issue, saying on the Senate floor, “even if we had a high IQ president right now, and we surely don’t, it wouldn’t be enough.” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, said that lawmakers should not leave Washington for a planned recess without passing regulations on A.I.

 

Even if a meeting with A.I. executives happens, the House has all but run out of time to act before the midterm elections. Mr. Johnson has canceled votes scheduled for later this month, and lawmakers will leave Washington this week without returning until November.

 

Mr. Trump knew almost nothing about artificial intelligence until the 2024 campaign, when OpenAI executives gave him a demonstration in Las Vegas. According to the book “Regime Change,” by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump was struck by ChatGPT’s capabilities, telling the executives that the chatbot’s ability to write instant poetry was “beautiful.” He then turned, in the same meeting, to how the technology worked and how a president might clear regulatory hurdles to let the industry grow.

 

Since returning to office, he has aligned himself with A.I. accelerationists pressing the government to dismantle obstacles to that growth. He has been influenced in particular by Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chipmaker Nvidia, and David Sacks, the Silicon Valley investor who has shaped much of the administration’s A.I. policy. Both argue that new guardrails on American companies would let China “win” the race.

 

As if to dramatize his alliance with the A.I. evangelists, Mr. Trump phoned Mr. Huang on Monday while Mr. Huang was onstage at a tech conference in Los Angeles. The president, who talks to the Nvidia chief regularly, declared that concerns about A.I. safety were overblown. “It’s a hoax,” the president said after Mr. Huang put him on speaker and held a microphone beside his phone for the benefit of the audience and the cameras. “The robots are not going to be taking over the world.”

 

Mr. Trump returned to the subject of A.I. later Monday, dismissing the risks outright. “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” he wrote, comparing it to the Russia investigation and his two impeachments. He questioned the motives of the executives asking to be reined in: “When, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?”

 

Mr. Trump has dismissed the domestic backlash as well. In one of Monday’s posts, he portrayed widespread opposition to data center construction — a major issue emerging across the country ahead of the midterms — as part of a “conspiracy” rather than genuine public anxiety, and predicted the A.I. industry would be “the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History — Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet.”

 

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” he wrote in his post earlier on Monday. “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

 

Abroad, governments are moving the other way. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada told Bloomberg News on Monday that he favored the creation of a global “technology stability” body to oversee artificial intelligence.

 

“There’s a need for coordination,” he said. “Ultimately, a technology stability board, in our view, along the lines of the Financial Stability Board would make sense.”

 

Beijing, too, has been sounding the alarm. Chen Yixin, China’s security minister, recently warned that the leading A.I. models pose risks to the Chinese system and called for stricter government oversight — suggesting that the country Mr. Trump invokes as a reason to deregulate is weighing the opposite course.

 

Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. Contact him securely on Signal: @jonathan.941

 

Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.

 

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