Trump, Johnson Reject AI Guardrails as Industry Leaders Sound the Alarm
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are pushing back against new federal safeguards for artificial intelligence just as some of the country’s most prominent AI executives are warning that the technology is advancing too quickly. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for slowing the pace of frontier AI development and stronger external oversight, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis have expressed support for greater coordination or restraint. Johnson, meanwhile, has cautioned against Congress imposing an emergency moratorium and argued that AI companies should play a central role in developing guardrails. Trump went further Monday, writing that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs” is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” while warning AI critics to “BEWARE!”
J.B. Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, issued the following statement:
“Republican leadership’s response to the growing warnings about artificial intelligence is disturbingly and dangerously negligent. . Researchers are quitting these companies and sounding alarms. Americans are worried about their jobs; communities are confronting the enormous energy demands of data centers; and families are already experiencing harms from AI systems.
“But the President thinks he, and he alone, can be the sole guardrail. Speaker Johnson is content to concede governance to the companies who created the problem. And Sen. Ted Cruz recently joked that if there are going to be ‘killer robots,’ he would rather they be American than Chinese. These statements read like an SNL skit, but the stakes are serious.
“Congress exists to govern and to protect the American public. Corporations recklessly developing and deploying technology capable of disrupting labor markets, critical infrastructure, and national security necessitates independent oversight. Congress and the administration should seriously consider a pause on the development of the most advanced AI systems while an independent federal regulatory body is established with the expertise, authority and resources necessary to evaluate these systems before companies deploy powerful models. We deserve better than to be held captive by a do-nothing President, and stalled Congress, while tech oligarchs treat the world like their personal play thing.”