(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump's opposition to guardrails on artificial intelligence puts him at odds with a growing number of lawmakers from both parties, with AI safety fears adding to voters' misgivings about the technology heading into the midterm elections.
Most Read from Bloomberg
In a rapid-fire series of social media posts, Trump on Monday belittled a push led by Anthropic PBC and OpenAI to slow work on cutting-edge systems, invoking bombastic language to dismiss existential fears about AI as "a hoax." Later in the day, he made an impromptu call to Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who was onstage at a technology conference and put their conversation on speakerphone.
"The robots will not be taking over. AI will not be taking over the rest of the world," Trump told Huang, who was a featured guest at the All-In summit in Los Angeles. "We have to do things, and we have to do them prudently, but that doesn't mean we're going to stop an industry."
Taken together, Trump's remarks represented his most vigorous defense against attempts to pace the development of a technology that's central to his economic agenda and behind a historic US stock market rally. Any or delay in progress on so-called frontier AI systems would be unwelcome among investors who are betting that the AI boom will drive hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditure.
Highlighting the stakes for Trump, who views the stock market as a benchmark of his success as president, shares of chipmakers that have benefited from a surge in AI infrastructure spending slid on Monday, with Nvidia falling 3.4% and Micron Technology Inc. declining 5.3%.
David Sacks, a venture capitalist who served as Trump's AI czar and is now co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science & Technology, expressed similar ideas in a Bloomberg Television interview Monday. Anthropic and OpenAI are free to slow development of their most sophisticated models on their own if they believe the technology poses serious risks, he said, arguing they don't need new regulation to do it.
"I don't really believe this claim that they can't make their products safe unless the government steps in and imposes requirements on companies that aren't even at the frontier," Sacks said.
Trump's pushback was prompted by a 3,800-word essay posted Saturday from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who urged restraining development of the most advanced systems so researchers can better understand potential threats. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk — whose companies are bitter rivals to Anthropic — quickly endorsed Amodei's missive, adding to a groundswell across Silicon Valley supporting steps to address AI's increasingly unpredictable risks.
In Washington, the president increasingly stands alone with his rejection of tighter oversight, as lawmakers float a range of measures aimed at addressing AI safety concerns. A bipartisan group of senators including Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz and Democratic Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar are working on legislation requiring top AI developers to prevent catastrophic risks.
Other proposals include a measure from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who aligns with Democrats, calling for a ban on the so-called superintelligent AI that stirred Amodei's latest warnings. Lawmakers have also floated the idea of a kill switch for AI as part of a separate bill.
Yet Congress is unlikely to act on any AI legislation anytime soon, with the House slated to leave Washington on Thursday and not return until after the November elections. The brief lame duck session after the election is expected to focus on a plan to boost the Pentagon budget.
"Given what we know about technology, we can't stuff AI back in a box. But we can collectively determine how it's developed and how it's used, rather than sitting back and letting AI and its fallout happen to us," former President Barack Obama said in a statement.
Obama, a Democrat who now only rarely wades in on public policy debates, said he was neither an AI accelerationist nor a doomer predicting humanity's destruction. "But at the end of the day, voluntary standards made by a handful of tech companies won't be enough," he said, instead urging lawmakers in Washington to "get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns, anticipate AI's impact on jobs and our kids, and make sure that AI's benefits are widely spread."
Risking Trump's wrath, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson cautiously signaled his openness to regulation, saying on Monday that lawmakers "potentially" will need to impose guardrails on the industry, though he cautioned it would likely take "some time" to fashion legislation with broad enough support to pass.
"This is a very complex issue that requires a lot of work and a bipartisan solution," Johnson told reporters at the Capitol.
Anxiety about AI's existential risks burst into the mainstream last week, driven by the high-profile departure of Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who accused AI companies of "gambling with our lives" in a resignation post he shared on social media. Dozens of other AI researchers showed support for Coxon's post, which called for slowing a technology that he said "could kill us all by the end of the decade."
Those safety concerns threaten to compound bipartisan resentment of AI ahead of the November election, where the technology is emerging as a core issue in congressional and local races. Voters have grown increasingly frustrated by the impact of the AI buildout, particularly the rapid nationwide proliferation of data centers blamed for driving up utility prices.
In one of his posts Monday, Trump blamed a "SICK conspiracy" for voter backlash on AI data centers and increased concern about frontier models.
Despite Trump's complaints, warnings about existential threats posed by AI have continued unabated from industry figures. Also on Monday, Microsoft Corp.'s AI researchers released a new set of guiding tenets that place limits on the development of cutting-edge models. In a 15,000-word manifesto, the team said models shouldn't have legal rights or personhood, and shouldn't be engineered to escape human control or deceive users. The system should not complete a task if it requires violating the AI's guiding principles, according to the manifesto.
The debate over AI safety is also looming over Trump's upcoming summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, where artificial intelligence will be at the top of the agenda. Trump has consistently warned that the US must stay ahead of China in AI to protect national security, as competition between the world's two largest economies over frontier technology intensifies.
For their part, Chinese officials have rejected the American tech leaders' calls to slow AI for safety reasons as "fearmongering" and criticized claims that Chinese AI progress poses a global security threat. China worries that the safety warnings could be used as a pretext by the US to further tighten export restrictions on advanced technology, said Sun Chenghao, a fellow at Tsinghua University's Center for International Security and Strategy in Beijing. The Trump administration has taken a mostly hands-off approach to AI since the president's return to office last year. In June, Trump signed an AI cybersecurity executive order that left it up to companies to decide whether they want their new AI models reviewed by the government, and earlier this month the administration persuaded Group of 20 nations to embrace principles calling for a light touch toward AI and other emerging technologies.
Skepticism remains in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street about how far Anthropic and OpenAI would go in reining in AI development, especially with the companies preparing for record-setting initial public offerings. Both Amodei and Altman took pains to emphasize that their plans to pace work on the latest AI models wouldn't translate into a pullback in growth of their businesses or spending plans.
"Whether calls to pace advanced model development will gain traction across the industry remains uncertain, but we believe they are more aimed at shaping a regulatory framework acceptable to leading AI labs," said Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi at UBS Chief Investment Office. "We therefore expect AI investment to continue."
--With assistance from Rita Nazareth, Ed Ludlow, Natasha Mascarenhas, Ian King and Jordan Fabian.
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
©2026 Bloomberg L.P.