“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.”
Posted by Leslie Eastman
Late last week, I argued that America cannot afford to let environmental-lawfare campaigns, spy-generated social media influence, and intellectual-property theft hand the Chinese Communist Party a substantial strategic advantage in developing artificial intelligence (AI).
The appropriate response to China’s meddling in US AI business is absolutely not naïve “cooperation,” but a serious commitment to securing our research, expanding reliable energy and data-center capacity, and treating China’s AI ambitions as the highly complex national-security challenge they plainly are.
It appears President Donald Trump agrees with me.
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.
I will simply note that this would not be the first time that China used our “experts” against us. Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the “coronavirus experts” implemented a great deal of destructive policy under the banners of science and safety.
But more fiscally astute observers suggest an alternative explanation. Perhaps AI companies are facing slowing model gains, soaring compute and infrastructure costs, and growing public resistance to the data centers needed to sustain the race. Calls to slow development may therefore be as much about managing expectations, cutting spending, and rebuilding public support as about protecting humanity.
Let’s call this one the “Save the IPO” hypothesis.
Anthropic is on the frontline of AI development, as is OpenAI. New regulations can be tailored to hinder the success of other firms that are a little less far along in development. And I will also note that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is one of Anthropic’s biggest customers, paying a $1.25 billion monthly fee for exclusive use of its Colossus cluster.
Billions are on the line in being among the first “winners” in the AI race. Reuters reported that Anthropic projected as much as $18 billion in 2026 revenue and $55 billion in 2027 revenue. By comparison, OpenAI had passed a $25 billion annualized revenue rate by early 2026 but remained heavily investment-intensive, underscoring that immense sales do not automatically equal profits in an industry with substantial computing and infrastructure costs.
Meanwhile, the White House AI Czar David Sacks says Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman already dominate frontier AI and therefore can voluntarily slow development if they believe their unreleased systems pose serious risks. He argues they should not use safety concerns to seek exemptions from antitrust rules, preemptive regulatory approval, or industry-controlled evaluation regimes, which he portrays as potential mechanisms for regulatory capture.
Sacks also added that a China-inclusive global slowdown is unlikely.
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
…So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
It is clear Trump will not allow a small group of well-connected AI “experts” to convert speculative fears into a Washington-designed moat around their own market share.
A competitive free market paired with strong enforcement against Chinese espionage and theft will produce better technology and more resilient national security than regulatory capture masquerading as “safety.”
China benefits when America’s innovators are tied down by bureaucrats; the U.S. benefits when entrepreneurs remain free to compete, build, and win.
I am glad to see the current administration applying the lessons learned from COVID to protect American AI development.
