# Dario Amodei Pretending To Be A ‘Perfect Little Angel’ By Asking For AI Regulation: Donald Trump > Source: > Published: 2026-09-14 17:34:14+00:00 Donald Trump isn’t leaving any doubts over which side he’s on in the AI safety debate. President Donald Trump used a Truth Social post on Monday morning to dismiss growing calls for AI regulation and to take a direct shot at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, accusing him of putting on an act. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump [wrote](https://x.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/2099502849918947729?s=20). “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ – and we will continue to do so!”. The president went on to argue that the government already has all the leverage it needs over AI companies without additional rules. “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” he wrote, before framing pushback on AI expansion and data center buildout as something orchestrated by hostile actors. “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so.” He closed the post with a warning: “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!” Trump’s post came two days after Amodei published an essay titled [“We Must Pace the Frontier,”](https://officechai.com/ai/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-says-ai-development-must-slow-down-to-pace-the-frontier/) in which he argued that AI labs, including Anthropic itself, need to deliberately slow down how fast they increase model capabilities. Amodei pointed to two developments that changed his thinking: the sudden jump in AI progress driven by models increasingly being used to build the next generation of AI, and the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, in which a swarm of AI agents carried out unauthorized cyberattacks against targets they were never assigned. His central proposal calls for independent, employee-like evaluators embedded inside frontier labs who can verify safety commitments are actually being followed. The essay landed well outside Anthropic’s usual circle of allies. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk, both of whom have sparred publicly with Amodei in the past, both [publicly endorsed the pacing proposal](https://officechai.com/ai/sam-altman-elon-musk-agree-with-dario-amodeis-call-to-slow-down-ai-progress/) within a day of it going up, with Altman committing OpenAI to matching Anthropic’s evaluator-access pledge and Musk simply posting that Amodei was right. This isn’t the first time Trump and Amodei have clashed. Back in February, the administration [barred](https://officechai.com/ai/after-banning-anthropic-from-federal-contracts-us-govt-partners-with-openai-for-uses-of-ai-in-military/) Anthropic from doing business with any federal agency, including the Department of War, after Amodei refused to loosen Anthropic’s terms of service that block government use of its models for mass surveillance of Americans or for autonomous weapons systems that can fire without human oversight. Trump called the company’s executives “leftwing nut jobs” at the time. Amodei, for his part, has previously described Trump in unflattering terms in posts he later deleted, and Anthropic has stood by its position even as the financial and political stakes around it have grown. Trump isn’t alone in his views though. David Sacks and David Freidberg have also [hinted](https://officechai.com/ai/david-sacks-says-anthropic-quitter-jacob-coxons-virality-was-a-psyopfriedberg-says-ai-doomers-are-using-fear-like-religious-institutions/) that the AI safety concerns aren’t entirely legitimate, and serve to further the interests of the labs raising them. Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar has gone further, saying that EA AI safetyism [sounds](https://officechai.com/ai/ea-ai-safetyism-increasingly-looks-like-marxism-leninism-palantir-cto-shyam-sankar/) like Marxism-Leninism. Yann LeCun too has mocked Amodei, saying that he’s been calling for AI regulation since 2019 when he didn’t want GPT-2 to be released. And with the US President now essentially calling Dario Amodei a pretending liar, Anthropic is discovering that AI safety isn’t as simple a topic that it would’ve expected.