At his Doonbeg golf course on Sunday, President Trump rejected pacing frontier AI, said catastrophic scenarios “won’t happen,” and framed the China race as decisive — “whoever wins AI wins.”
President Donald Trump on Sunday dismissed calls to slow or tighten frontier AI development, casting catastrophic-risk warnings as the work of “very negative forces” and saying the United States must stay ahead of China, Reuters reported from Doonbeg, Ireland. Speaking to reporters at his golf course when asked whether the industry should slow down or face more regulation, Trump said America is leading China in AI and that he wants to keep it that way “because whoever wins AI wins.”
“We could put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” Trump said, according to Reuters. UPI and Al Jazeera carried the same wire-day framing: he acknowledged possible guardrails but downplayed an industry slowdown and treated the China lead as the priority.
The comments landed one day after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a three-step plan to pace the frontier, a package AI Tech Daily already covered as Top. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk had publicly backed pacing. Trump did not name those executives in the Reuters quotes; the news is the White House political signal against a slowdown, not a rehash of Amodei’s evaluators-to-global coordination ladder.
As a same-wave Monday update, Altman elaborated on X that pacing is not stopping and that OpenAI welcomes a federal framework with consistent frontier safety requirements, CNBC reported. “When we talk about ‘pacing’, we do not mean ‘stopping’,” Altman wrote, adding that “no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness.” That clarification sits beside Trump’s China-first dismissal; it does not change Sunday’s presidential line.
This brief covers Trump’s Doonbeg response to AI slowdown and regulation questions as reported by Reuters and wire reprints. It is not a second pass on Amodei’s three-step plan.
Sources
- https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-says-very-negative-forces-raising-exaggerated-concerns-over-ai-2026-09-13/
- https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/09/13/Trump-dismisses-calls-AI-development-slowdown-fears-mount/7791789333525/
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/13/trump-dismisses-calls-for-ai-slowdown-from-leading-tech-ceos
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/14/sam-altman-ai-slowdown-anthropic-amodei-musk.html
- https://www.aitechdaily.com/amodei-pace-the-frontier/