Something to Know - 13 September

Artificial Intelligence is really in the news.   It could be a fatal ending, or something a bit less.   Is this something that we need to know?    Here are two entries from news aggregators, and the Trump position on this issue seems to favor a continuing philosophy of "small potatoes outcome."   Of course, Trump just sees just money, while others take mankind as the issue.   In any event, you may need to keep up on the discussion to stay relevant.   Trump is the last person you would ask about the complexities of computer programming and Artificial Intelligence, or any intelligence for that matter.

1 big thing: Hitting the AI brakes

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios

Over nine startling hours yesterday, the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for their models. Their new stance: Prioritize safety over growth, even at a cost. The big picture: AI's unrelenting growth has hit an inflection point with the public, Washington and even the companies building it, Axios' Ben Berkowitz writes. Data centers are unpopular. People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms, legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down. ⚠️ Against that backdrop, the industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday. At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now. An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying "Dario is right." Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown. At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier." In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be better off doing that as a private company. At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's chief scientist — tweeted: "Dario's essay points towards the right path forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment." 🔎 Between the lines: Publicly putting safety ahead of technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a crackdown that's not on its terms. Legislators are begging House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the "threat" of AI. The more extreme alternative is something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the most advanced AI illegal. Reality check: Most people realize there's too much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic riches and slightly less historic riches. Let's see whether they actually agree on what oversight ("embedded third-party evaluators") and "slow" mean, then follow through. 🇨🇳 Friction point: No one in China is having the same kind of we'd-better-stop moment. Influential Silicon Valley tech voices, including former Trump official David Sacks, spent yesterday highlighting the counterargument that slowing down just lets adversaries — with no such safety qualms — catch up. In a late-night post, Sacks effectively dared OpenAI and Anthropic to voluntarily pace the AI frontier without waiting for the government. "If you don't, we'll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop." Amodei even acknowledged that a safety regime only really works if authoritarian governments come to the table, too. "Pacing within democracies will be limited by the lead that U.S. companies have over authoritarian regimes, chiefly the Chinese Communist Party," he wrote. "If we slow down by more than this amount, then (unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk." The bottom line: Yesterday may go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves. Share this story ... Read Amodei's essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier."

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AI Overview

President Donald Trump’s position on artificial intelligence centers on maintaining U.S. dominance over China, promoting domestic tech innovation, and minimizing state-level regulations, balanced with targeted federal oversight focused on national security.

Core Philosophy: Winning the AI Race

Geopolitical Competition: Trump views artificial intelligence as a critical national security and economic battleground, frequently emphasizing that the U.S. must beat China. He has asserted that the U.S. leads China by roughly a year and intends to maintain that advantage. [1, 2]
Dismissal of Existential Risks: Trump has downplayed warnings from industry insiders and researchers regarding existential or human-extinction threats from advanced AI, stating that these concerns involve "things that won't happen," and rejected calls from some tech leaders to slow down development. [1, 2, 3]
Support for Infrastructure: He strongly supports data center construction and energy infrastructure expansion, arguing that opposing such developments harms American competitiveness. [1]

Regulatory Approach and Executive Actions

Blocking State Regulations: Trump signed an executive order establishing a uniform national policy framework intended to preempt and block "onerous" state-level AI regulations that the administration argues could fragment the market and hinder national progress. [1, 2]
National Security and Model Reviews: Shifting somewhat from a strictly hands-off approach, Trump issued an executive order requiring major AI developers (such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google) to voluntarily provide the federal government with early access and a 30-day review window for advanced frontier models prior to public release, specifically to evaluate national security and cyber capabilities. [1, 2, 3]

As BBC News reported, Trump downplayed these warnings during international remarks, insisting that prioritizing global technological leadership remains paramount. Further analysis on these industry friction points and calls for developmental slowdowns is detailed by the Washington Post. [1, 2]

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Juan Matute

R.B.R.

C.C.R.C.