Trump Says He’s the Only AI ‘Guardrail’ Needed and Mocks Anthropic CEO’s Call for AI Slowdown: ‘Pretending to Be a Perfect Little Angel’

President Donald Trump said in a Monday Truth Social post that the only "control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT," mocking Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as "pretending to be a 'perfect little angel'" after Amodei's Sept. 12 essay called for slowing AI capability improvements. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk both endorsed Amodei's position, with Altman writing "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier" and Musk posting "Dario is right." A recent Pew Research Center study found roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults believe AI is advancing too fast and 67% have little to no confidence the U.S. government can regulate it.

After the CEOs of AI giants Anthropic https://variety.com/t/anthropic/ and OpenAI https://variety.com/t/openai/ this weekend issued calls for the industry to slow development over safety concerns, President Donald Trump https://variety.com/t/donald-trump/ weighed in the topic — downplaying the need for any protections in AI tech development other than himself. “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 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 ” Trump wrote https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117269745153543631 in a post on his Truth Social account Monday. Trump continued: “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies 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. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE Thank you for your attention to this matter President DONALD J. TRUMP” Popular on Variety Trump’s comments came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday, Sept. 12, posted a 3,815-word essay online https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier warning about the dangers of AI. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. Amodei also said this: “I won’t lie to you — there are real dangers. And I think for too long the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.” A few hours after Amodei shared his essay, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a statement agreeing that a slowdown was necessary. “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks,” Altman wrote in a post on X https://x.com/sama/status/2098811563415150910 . “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.” Tech mogul Elon Musk, whose SpaceX is the parent company of AI development company xAI and the X social media platform, also agreed with Amodei’s assessment, posting https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2098789109980332057 simply: “Dario is right.” Surveys have shown that many Americans are worried https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/american-ai-societal-impact-government-regulation-pew-study-1236783185/ about the societal impact of AI. In a recent Pew Research Center study https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/american-ai-societal-impact-government-regulation-pew-study-1236783185/ , roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults said they believe AI is advancing at too fast a rate — and 67% said they had little to no confidence that the U.S. government could regulate the technology, with more Democrats than Republicans were skeptical of the government’s ability to regulate AI. Fears over the threats posted by AI kicked into higher gear after Jacob Coxon, a former AI researcher at Anthropic, last week said he resigned from the company because he believed the company and OpenAI, his former employer, were “gambling with our lives” https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/ai-could-kill-us-all-anthropic-researcher-jacob-coxon-1236855688/ with the rapidly development of the technology. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote in a post on X. “This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”