President Donald Trump rejected calls from leading artificial intelligence (AI) executives to slow model development, arguing on Sunday that any pause would hand China the lead in a race the United States must win.
House Speaker Mike Johnson and former White House AI adviser David Sacks made versions of the same argument. An AI safety debate turned into a contest over China.
Congress Hands AI Safety to the Developers
Johnson told CNN’s State of the Union that Congress has already set guardrails. The burden sits with the labs.
“…there is an obvious corporate responsibility that the people who are creating these models have to ensure that their products are safe.”
He spoke a day after Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI urged an AI slowdown. No federal rule obliges any of them to follow through.
Sacks told the three chief executives to stop asking permission. He argued their caution is also commercial, since a damaging cyberattack would expose them to liability claims.
The China Argument Broke on Sunday
According to David Sacks China would never sign anything.
“China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well,” he said.
Meanwhile, China’s President Xi Jinping has called for a “consensus-based global AI governance framework” at the BRICS summit in New Delhi. He also pledged a BRICS AI open source community.
BRICS is an 11 nation bloc led by China, India and Russia.
Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders has demanded a full pause and wants a treaty with Xi. Trump meets him at the White House on September 24, with AI on the agenda.
Amodei Is Not the Dove Washington Describes
Anthropic chief Dario Amodei told CBS News the toughest dilemma in his plan is what happens if China does not follow.
“The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of of AI progress…I think that’s going to be very difficult because the incentives to pull ahead and the military advantage that you get from that are so large. And honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible,” Amodei explained.
His essay asks Washington to block advanced chip sales to China and break up smuggling networks. He wrote that a Chinese lead would pose grave danger.
Step three of that plan needs governments to negotiate with authoritarian states. That is the step Congress spent Sunday declining.
Stanford’s 2026 AI Index measured the American lead over the best Chinese model at 2.7% in March. Chinese labs have also been accused of copying American AI models.
Eleven days before Trump sits down with Xi, the only people able to slow AI down are the ones competing to build it fastest.
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