President Trump pushed back on the need for tighter federal regulations on artificial intelligence and dismissed safety concerns as a hoax that would leave the industry in financial ruin and hand China a competitive edge.
The president's forceful messaging on AI comes as industry leaders sound increasingly urgent warnings about the need for regulation to guard against potential dangers from their own technology, while public backlash builds to the construction of the data centers needed to power it.
"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 Truth Social on Monday. "There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China."
In a separate post, he later questioned why industry leaders were calling for regulation, which he said could "drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy." He likened worries about AI's safety risks to the allegations that underpinned impeachment proceedings during his first term, "and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure through the Destructions' and Deviants' foul play and illegal conduct."
The president's position on AI and data centers contrasts with how many voters feel about the issue heading into the midterms. A March Gallup poll showed that nearly half of those surveyed "strongly oppose" the construction of local AI data centers. And the opposition isn't just coming from Democrats-just under 40% of Republicans polled by Gallup are strongly against the creation of data centers. The outcry has become a mounting political liability for Republicans and some Democrats ahead of the election in November.
"We can put up guardrails, and we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up," Trump told reporters Sunday while traveling in Ireland. "And they're bringing up things that won't happen." Trump has also said he uses AI but declined to provide further details.
AI executives, including Trump ally Elon Musk, have called to slow down advancements of the booming technology out of concern of the risks it could create, in what has become a rapidly escalating crisis for the industry.
Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei has been among the lead voices calling to slow down AI's development. Trump said in his post that the administration has taken issue with and moved to stop select AI companies and their leaders from certain actions in the past-singling out Amodei as an example-and would continue to do so.
In a post to his personal blog, Amodei called for the AI industry to pace development of cutting-edge tools, suggesting new measures including more global coordination among democratic countries and the introduction of embedded third-party safety evaluators.
"I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability, and we used that time to advance alignment, we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong," he wrote.
Anthropic and the Trump administration have been clashing for months. Anthropic sued the administration after the Pentagon marked the company as a supply chain risk, and argued the Pentagon illegally retaliated against the company for its standing on artificial intelligence safety. A federal judge recently ruled in favor of Anthropic and found the administration's actions were unlawful.
An Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, recently said he was quitting the artificial-intelligence industry over fears that the lab and its competitors are racing to build systems they won't be able to control, a sign of mounting safety concerns within top AI companies.
Coxon, who specializes in training new AI models by having them consume vast amounts of data, said he doesn't want to participate in an industrywide rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves, worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity.
Other tech companies have signaled a need for caution. Microsoft published a provisional code of conduct that it aims to apply when training new AI models. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also warned that the dizzying pace of progress could go "very badly" and that humans could lose "control of the future to AI."
"We welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI," Altman said in a post on X. "No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness."
Separately on Monday, Vice President JD Vance told reporters the administration needs to "regulate smartly" but that he was skeptical of companies requesting additional safeguards.
"I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them," Vance said. "It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) told reporters Monday he expected Trump to convene a meeting with AI companies, possibly at the White House, as soon as this week to discuss a path forward.