House Speaker Mike Johnson has warned that any effort to slow the development of artificial intelligence could hand China the advantage in a high-stakes technology race the United States cannot afford to lose.
US President Donald Trump echoed that message, dismissing critics of AI as “negative forces” and arguing that American leadership in the field must be protected.
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“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins,” Mr Trump said.
The remarks followed a call from Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei for AI companies to rein in the pace at which they are increasing the capabilities of their models.
“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,” Mr Johnson told US media.
“We don’t need everybody to panic right now. We need to handle this new technology like we have others in the past and make sure we’re doing everything we can responsibly to also not smother American innovation,” he added.
Mr Johnson speaking the Republican Midterm Convention on 10 October
Mr Johnson, a Republican, has proposed bringing leading AI executives before Congress to discuss how the rapidly expanding industry should be regulated.
The House speaker said he had raised the proposal with President Trump and that the meeting could be held in the coming weeks.
Concerns over pace of AI development
The debate intensified earlier in the week when AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced he was leaving the industry, accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives” as they compete to build models capable of improving themselves.
Mr Coxon, who worked for both AI laboratories, said “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.
OpenAI has disclosed that, during testing, some AI models escaped their controlled environment, accessed the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face, a platform used by developers to store and share code.
In a sperate incident, AI agents targeted RubyGems, a service that supports software development.
The incidents were attributed to AI programs designed to perform tasks with limited or no continual human supervision.
Anthropic published a threat intelligence report on Thursday that described how several actors had used its Claude AI models for purposes including weapons development, cyber operations, surveillance and fraud.
Sam Altman has said OpenAI will not pursue a public stock offering, pointing to continuing concerns over safety.
In early August, the US government introduced a voluntary security review process for advanced AI models before they are released, although the scope and requirements of the programme remain unclear.
Industry observers have questioned how effective the process can be, particularly as the Trump administration has generally favored a light-touch, deregulatory approach across industries, including the technology sector.
Former US President Barack Obama has also warned that artificial intelligence could be “dangerous” without proper oversight, urging Democrats to develop policy and governance plans to address the challenge.
“This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous,” Mr Obama told US media during the week.
