Trump dismisses AI slowdown as 'whoever wins with AI wins' while Democrats call for urgent action

President Donald Trump on Sunday played down the need for his administration to check the development of artificial intelligence, a day after Anthropic's Dario Amodei published an essay calling on the industry to pace the frontier and OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk endorsed it. Speaking to reporters during a weekend trip to Ireland, Trump said the United States leads China in AI and that 'whoever wins with AI wins.' He acknowledged a need for some regulation but gave no specifics, and attributed warnings about the technology moving too fast to unidentified 'negative forces' raising 'things that won't happen.' The Verge reports that House Speaker Mike Johnson shares the view that the industry is overreacting and that slowing down could hand China the edge. Democrats took the opposite line. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told ABC's This Week that lawmakers should 'take decisive action now so that we can slow down, as the CEOs have recently acknowledged.' His remarks followed public warnings from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon. Former President Barack Obama, interviewed by Jeffries at a Democratic fundraiser on Thursday, said the party should make AI one of its 'central agendas' and 'have a very clear plan' for its economic and safety effects, according to The New York Times. Obama has offered himself as a sounding board to AI executives and has spoken with both Amodei and Altman. The split matters because the labs' proposal depends on government support for any coordinated slowdown, and the White House is signaling it will not provide one.