The men who built artificial intelligence spent the weekend asking to be slowed down. By Monday 14 September, President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson had dismissed the calls for regulation, and Congress came back with nothing on the table.
Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, started it. On Saturday 12 September he published an open letter telling his own industry to “slow the pace” of AI, because the machines now build the next machines. Sam Altman of OpenAI backed him. “Dario is right,” Elon Musk posted.
Then Amodei sat down with CBS “Sunday Morning” on Sunday 13 September. “I won’t lie to you – there are real dangers,” he said. “And I think for too long the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.”
Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic engineer who quit last week, put it shorter. Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives,” he wrote. “It will be smart enough to kill us,” he told CBS.
So the makers had asked, on the record, for a speed limit. Johnson answered on CNN’s “State of the Union” the same Sunday: “The guys that are calling for this are the ones that are pushing the frontier,” and Congress must “resist” any “emergency moratorium.” Trump, at a golf event in Ireland: “No, I’m not downplaying” the risks — “it’s going to be more good than bad, by a lot.” By Monday morning he had a harder line. Calls for controls are a “sick conspiracy,” he posted, and “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades!” — the Guardian reported. Chuck Schumer asked for a classified Senate briefing on frontier-model testing, chip exports and cyber defense. The race is the risk, and the one man who could call a pause has decided not to.
Which leaves a vacuum. And a 77-year-old king is about to walk into it.
