Trump rejects call by CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI to slow AI down

President Trump dismissed a rare bipartisan call from the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development, telling reporters Sunday that the U.S. cannot afford to fall behind China.

"We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins," Trump said. "We can put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up, and they're bringing up things that won't happen."

Trump's comments were his first public response to a joint moment Saturday when Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI publicly backed a call to reduce the pace at which AI companies build more powerful models. The CEOs' statements came just days after Anthropic revealed that its chatbot, Claude, was being used to attempt to create bioweapons , spy on Ukraine and scam dating-app users.

On Saturday, Amodei posted an article titled "We Must Pace the Frontier." "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," he stated.

On X shortly thereafter, Altman responded: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier," he stated. Musk followed with only three words: "Dario is right."

On Thursday, Anthropic released a report titled "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026" , covering activity from December 2025 to August 2026.

In the report, Anthropic outlined seven categories of what it termed "disrupted misuse" of Claude.