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President Trump has made his choice: no, we won’t hit the brakes on artificial intelligence because a handful of Silicon Valley CEOs and some headline-grabbing researchers say we should. That was the message echoed by Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael on Fox News — dismissing apocalyptic predictions and framing AI as a contest we can’t afford to lose to China.
A choice between speed and safety
Last week Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry and governments to “pace the frontier” — proposing independent evaluators, coordinated safety standards, and government talks to slow capability gains. Sam Altman of OpenAI and even Elon Musk nodded in agreement, and markets briefly hiccuped as investors priced in the possibility of a pullback. President Trump, speaking from his resort, called the slowdown crowd “very negative forces” and bluntly said, “whoever wins AI wins.” Emil Michael was on Fox to say he’s with that posture — national security and competition with China come first.
What this looks like for ordinary Americans
This debate isn’t academic. When CEOs talk about pacing, markets react — chip stocks and AI-linked equities slid as traders weighed slower demand. Workers in factories and data centers are watching too: trade controls or an accelerated AI rollout will reshape jobs, supply chains, and the cost of everyday tech. And yes, there was an Anthropic researcher who resigned and went public with concerns — a reminder that these issues touch real people, not just op-eds and press releases.
Politics, geopolitics, and the leash on Big Tech
On paper, slowing AI sounds sensible. In practice, it requires coordinated restraint from labs, investors, Congress, and foreign governments — and that’s a tall order when Washington is openly saying speed equals advantage. China’s state media already framed the pacing proposal as a Cold War tactic, which raises the obvious risk: if American firms choke back, will the Chinese vacuum be filled? The White House is also flirting with export controls and other levers to keep tech edges without asking U.S. companies to self‑impose the kind of slowdown that would hamstring innovation.
So here’s the hard truth: we can’t have it both ways. If you trust Big Tech’s leaders to police themselves, remember profit motives and first-mover pressures are powerful. If you trust the government to throttle development, remember geopolitics will push policymakers toward advantage, not voluntary restraint. Which do you want steering this country’s future — private boardrooms or elected officials who answer to voters?
