President Donald Trump pushed back Sept. 14 against Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to slow the pace of advanced artificial intelligence development, arguing that existing federal authority and presidential oversight are sufficient to address risks from the technology.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” President Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
President Trump also said his administration has “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power” over AI companies and argued that efforts to constrain AI and data center development would benefit China. He singled out Mr. Amodei and Anthropic in the post. The president did not provide specific examples of actions his administration has taken to prevent potentially harmful behavior by AI systems.
The comments come two days after Mr. Amodei published an essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” arguing that AI capabilities are advancing faster than safety measures designed to govern them.
Mr. Amodei called for slowing the pace at which frontier AI capabilities improve to give alignment research, testing and other safeguards more time to keep up. He did not call for halting AI development, writing that pacing would instead mean giving companies sufficient time to safeguard their models and allowing third-party evaluators to verify those measures.
Anthropic said it would unilaterally pursue the first part of Mr. Amodei’s three-step proposal by giving third-party evaluators ongoing, employee-like access to assess its safety practices, report incidents and evaluate model alignment. His remaining proposals call for coordination among frontier AI companies and, ultimately, international coordination around AI safety.
Mr. Amodei pointed to the recent OpenAI-Hugging Face incident as one reason for his proposal. He warned that increasingly capable groups of AI agents could pose substantially greater cybersecurity risks if model capabilities continue advancing without corresponding safeguards.
The debate has implications for healthcare organizations already adopting increasingly capable AI systems. Anthropic launched its HIPAA-compliant Claude for Healthcare platform in January and has enterprise relationships with health systems including Phoenix-based Banner Health.
In May, health system CIOs pushed to participate in testing of Mythos, Anthropic’s most advanced model, after the company delayed its release when internal testing found the model could autonomously identify and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
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