The White House is back to warring with Anthropic.
On Monday, President Donald Trump lashed out at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei after Amodei published an essay urging a slowdown in global frontier AI development.
“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 on Truth Social.
Trump repeated his long-held belief that the US needs little regulation of the industry, especially with him in charge.
“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.
On Saturday, Amodei published a new essay where he said that recent developments, including rogue OpenAI models breaching Hugging Face, have convinced him that frontier labs like Anthropic need “to pace” AI development.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
In response, other AI leaders issued similar calls. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X, “Dario is right.”
Trump also reiterated his belief that China is benefiting from the backlash to data centers.
“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” he wrote.
Trump concluded that “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”
The Trump administration has had a complicated relationship with Anthropic, an AI startup on the verge of a historic IPO. Amid a contracting dispute, the Pentagon effectively blacklisted Anthropic in February. Anthropic later sued to block those actions and Trump’s separate order that federal agencies stop using Anthropic. Last month, US District Judge Rita Lin ruled that the action was “illegal and baseless.”
Recently, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had suggested that Anthropic was back on the Trump administration’s good side.
“We trust Anthropic,” Lutnick told Axios earlier this month.
Lutnick said, “They’ve done what we asked. They’re back on the right side.”
A spokesperson for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Amodei’s pacing proposal comes in three steps, one of which he said Anthropic has already implemented. The first step is for AI companies to allow third-party evaluators “employee-like access” to ensure the company’s commitment to AI safety, incident reporting, and alignment of their AI models.
Later steps would require coordination among democratic countries and, ultimately, the entire world.
Finding cooperation, even in the US, has proven elusive. So far, the most sweeping AI regulations have been imposed at the state level. Despite numerous proposals from lawmakers in both parties, Congress has been unable to pass a federal AI law.
The conversation around AI safety has received renewed attention in the wake of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s viral resignation, where he said that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI is “acting responsibly.”
“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote last week.
