# Trump and Mike Johnson think the AI industry is overreacting

> A day after Anthropic chief Dario Amodei published a long open letter urging the industry to pace the frontier and deliberately slow AI development, the pushback arrived from an unexpected direction: the top of the Republican Party. President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have signaled they think the industry is overreacting, arguing that any self-imposed brakes would simply hand China the lead in a technology they treat as strategic. The reaction is striking because Amodei's call found rare agreement among rivals, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk voicing support on X and even Alphabet's Demis Hassabis offering a tentative nod. That left the safety camp and Washington's governing wing talking past each other, one worried about moving too fast and the other about not moving fast enough. The split matters because it shapes whether a slowdown is even plausible. If the people writing US policy see caution as surrender to Beijing, then voluntary restraint by labs runs into a competitive logic that rewards whoever keeps pushing, which is exactly the dilemma Amodei says he has no clean answer for.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: The Verge · Published Monday, September 14, 2026_

## Wortins' read

A day after Anthropic chief Dario Amodei published a long open letter urging the industry to pace the frontier and deliberately slow AI development, the pushback arrived from an unexpected direction: the top of the Republican Party. President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have signaled they think the industry is overreacting, arguing that any self-imposed brakes would simply hand China the lead in a technology they treat as strategic. The reaction is striking because Amodei's call found rare agreement among rivals, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk voicing support on X and even Alphabet's Demis Hassabis offering a tentative nod. That left the safety camp and Washington's governing wing talking past each other, one worried about moving too fast and the other about not moving fast enough. The split matters because it shapes whether a slowdown is even plausible. If the people writing US policy see caution as surrender to Beijing, then voluntary restraint by labs runs into a competitive logic that rewards whoever keeps pushing, which is exactly the dilemma Amodei says he has no clean answer for.

## Source

[Read the full story at The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/994441/trump-mike-johnson-ai-industry-overreacting)

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