Trump's Team Rejects the AI Industry's Call to Slow Down

Start by pinning down what was actually asked. Amodei's request was nothing like a halt to development. He asked the government to do two things: take part in discussions or issue a waiver so that competing AI companies could set common standards without breaching antitrust law, and help establish international coordination that would include the Chinese Communist Party. That same week Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also called for pacing development, and according to reports Alphabet's Demis Hassabis offered tentative support. METAL confirmed that in the early hours of September 13 Altman wrote on X, "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," and promised independent evaluators with employee-like access.

Sacks's reply turns the structure of that request on its head. His September 13 post on X, which METAL confirmed has passed 8.64 million views, opens with "Go ahead. You guys are the frontier." By any reasonable metric, he wrote, whether market share, revenue growth or model capability, Anthropic and OpenAI hold a duopoly on frontier intelligence, and it is the two companies themselves who claim the lead is widening through recursive self-improvement. So after saying, "If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible," he pinned it down: "But stop pretending you need anyone else's permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel." The image that fits is two cars out in front asking someone to put up a speed-limit sign, when they could simply press the brake without waiting for the sign.

What he seized on in particular was motive. "Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic," Sacks wrote, pointing out that the two companies face massive product-liability exposure if their products enable a cyberattack and that the market already punishes models that behave unpredictably. After the Hugging Face episode, trading some raw power for predictability is simply good business, he argued; call it alignment if you like, but it is just giving customers what they want. He also said the evaluation group METR is intertwined with Anthropic's investors and staff, and wrote that demanding a preferred regulatory framework as the price of slowing down "will look like blackmail of the public and the political system." His closing line was that if the two companies really do slow down they will buy goodwill for the next conversation, and if they do not, everyone will know this was a bid for regulatory capture or an election-season psyop.

Trump's and Johnson's logic is simpler than Sacks's, and that makes it sturdier. According to reports, Trump said, "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." On CNN on September 13, Johnson said, "If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American. So, we've got to have balance. We've got to have steady hands at the wheel." The US government views China's AI ecosystem as an economic and national security threat and has been caught short by China's advances before. From that vantage point, domestic regulation is a handicap handed to China, and the international coordination with China that Amodei requested is settled in Sacks's single line: "China is very unlikely to join a global agreement."

Where the two camps actually split is not speed but who writes the rules. The companies say they will slow down together if the government builds the framework; the government reads the demand for a framework itself as restraint of competition or regulatory capture. METAL has reported that OpenAI has been asking Congress whether slowing down together would violate antitrust law and covered Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez's essay rebutting a structure in which a few companies set the rules. To companies that are not at the frontier, common standards look like a ladder being pulled up, and the White House is standing on their side. Since Amodei himself asked for antitrust relief or government participation in the essay, Sacks's rebuttal found the weakest link in the request precisely.

The companies have started moving without the government. According to reports, on the night of September 13, US time, Altman committed, as Amodei proposed, to giving embedded third-party evaluators employee-level access and having them report incidents, and wrote on X that while these measures carry "significant costs," "pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness." That is exactly the form Sacks demanded: not asking permission, not waiting for an exemption, slowing your own company first. Still, the question of what happens when a third or fourth company fills the gap while these two slow down has gone unanswered in this framing, and that question is precisely why the companies wanted to bring the government in.

Here is where the board stands. The call to slow down won the agreement of four of the industry's top figures, and the government that received it refused the request while turning it around. To companies asking for regulation, the government said show us first, without regulation, and the companies have in fact begun to move first. What to watch next is whether the two companies' voluntary measures delay actual training runs by months, and what the companies outside the frontier ship in the meantime. To borrow Trump's line, whoever wins AI wins, and this weekend the government decided not to write the rules that determine who the winner is.