AI Companies Begging For Regulation Feels Like A Trojan Horse: US Vice President JD Vance

US Vice President JD Vance said in an interview that he is "a little bit weird" about frontier AI companies "begging the government to regulate them," calling the dynamic "a bit of a Trojan horse." Vance's remarks came the same day President Trump used a Truth Social post to dismiss Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's AI safety push as an act, accusing him of "pretending to be a 'perfect little angel.'" The comments follow Amodei's essay "We Must Pace the Frontier," which drew support within a day from Sam Altman, who committed OpenAI to matching Anthropic's evaluator-access pledge, and Elon Musk.

The US government is speaking in one voice about their wariness over calls from some AI companies for more AI regulation. “It’s something that we’re concerned by, but we wanna make sure that we actually regulate smartly, and we’re thoughtful about the risk here,” US Vice President JD Vance said in an interview. “So there are obviously risks to AI. There are some benefits to AI. I have to say, just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming 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.” Vance’s remarks came on the same day President Trump used https://officechai.com/ai/dario-amodei-pretending-to-be-a-perfect-little-angel-by-asking-for-ai-regulation-donald-trump/ a Truth Social post to dismiss Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s push for AI safety measures as an act, accusing him of “pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel.'” The two comments, arriving hours apart, amount to the clearest signal yet that the administration views the sudden wave of industry voices calling for a slowdown with skepticism rather than alarm. That wave started when Amodei published an essay called “We Must Pace the Frontier,” https://officechai.com/ai/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-says-ai-development-must-slow-down-to-pace-the-frontier/ arguing that frontier labs, Anthropic included, need to deliberately slow down capability gains and submit to independent evaluators with employee-like access inside their companies. What made the essay hard to write off as one CEO’s personal anxiety is who backed it next: Sam Altman and Elon Musk, two executives who have spent much of the past year publicly needling Amodei, both came out in support of the pacing proposal https://officechai.com/ai/sam-altman-elon-musk-agree-with-dario-amodeis-call-to-slow-down-ai-progress/ within a day, with Altman committing OpenAI to matching Anthropic’s evaluator-access pledge. Vance’s “Trojan horse” framing isn’t a new instinct for him. He’s been making a version of this argument since well before Amodei’s essay landed. In a speech at the AI Action Summit in Paris last year, Vance argued that heavy AI regulation would “unfairly benefit incumbents in the space” and pointedly asked the room to consider who tends to push hardest for restrictive rules: “It is very often the people who already have an incumbent advantage in the market. And when a massive incumbent comes to us asking us for safety regulations, we ought to ask whether that safety regulation is for the benefit of our people or whether it’s for the benefit of the incumbent.” The Trojan horse comment is that same logic condensed into a single image. The mechanics of why a scared public helps the biggest labs rather than hurts them are fairly straightforward. Frontier AI development is enormously capital intensive, and any rulebook that requires costly compliance infrastructure, embedded third-party evaluators, incident reporting systems, or specialized safety staff is a rulebook that a company already running at Anthropic or OpenAI’s scale can absorb far more easily than a startup training its first serious model. Amodei has actually acknowledged this dynamic directly. Responding to a claim that Anthropic wants to be the only major AI lab left standing, he pushed back on the idea that regulation and industry concentration are the same thing, but he also detailed how Anthropic has tried to structure its own policy proposals, including California’s SB53, to specifically apply to frontier labs above certain revenue or training-cost thresholds while exempting smaller and open-weight developers https://officechai.com/ai/claim-that-anthropic-wants-to-be-the-only-private-company-in-the-world-draws-ceo-dario-amodei-to-x-with-clarification/ . That’s precisely the shape of rule Vance is warning about: safety language on the label, moat-building underneath it. There’s also a simpler commercial incentive at work. A well-publicized warning about an existentially dangerous technology tends to reinforce the idea that whoever is building that technology must be sitting on something extraordinarily powerful, which is useful marketing for a company trying to justify enormous valuations and continued access to capital and compute. Fear of the product and hype for the product end up pulling in the same direction. None of that necessarily means the safety concerns raised by Amodei, Altman, and others are insincere. But it’s exactly the overlap between “this is dangerous” and “this is valuable” that gives Vance’s skepticism its opening, and it’s why the administration keeps returning to the same question: who actually benefits once the rules get written.