The US president attacks Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, as ‘perfect little angel’
Donald Trump has attacked what he calls a “sick conspiracy” against AI after the head of Anthropic called for a slowdown in the technology’s development.
The US president warned that China would benefit after the bosses of Silicon Valley’s top AI companies backed calls to restrict AI development for safety reasons.
He launched a tirade against Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, whom he accused of trying to be a “perfect little angel”.
Mr Trump wrote on Truth Social: “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ – and we will continue to do so!
“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!
“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centres, and the only one that is happy about it is China.”
JD Vance, the US vice-president, echoed Mr Trump’s comments, calling tech leaders’ requests a “Trojan horse”.
He added: “I have to say, just personally, 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.
“It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse.”
Mr Amodei released a letter at the weekend calling for an industry-wide slowdown to prevent safety issues going “seriously wrong”.
OpenAI has since called on the UK government to introduce mandatory safety rules for major AI developers.
Under proposals supported by the company, the UK’s AI Security Institute would play a central role in third-party testing and creating adaptive technical standards.
Tom Duff-Gordon, the company’s head of policy in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told Politico: “OpenAI is in a position to support legislation in the UK to establish durable, mandatory, capability-based requirements for frontier AI that would build on the set of voluntary commitments that we currently have.”
Under the plans, Britain would move from the current system of voluntary agreements with AI companies into enforceable standards, bringing the UK in line with emerging frameworks in the EU and US.
The UK government has not yet put forward plans for AI safety legislation, despite pressure from backbench MPs.
US tech stocks fell sharply on Wall Street after AI bosses called for a slowdown, with the Nasdaq Composite dropping by as much as 1.3pc.
Nvidia, the world’s largest listed company and a manufacturer of semiconductors used in the AI race, plunged by 4.2pc while fellow chipmaker AMD dropped 6.2pc.
The main European indexes in France, Germany and Spain were all down sharply on Monday following falls in South Korea and Japan overnight.