Updated Sept. 13, 2026, 11:11 a.m. ET
President Donald Trump says “a lot of negative forces” are impacting the AI industry, even as its leaders call for better regulations amid fears about misuse.
Trump made the comments during an appearance at a golf tournament in Ireland on Sept. 13, the day after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for greater precautions regarding artificial intelligence.
“Whoever wins AI wins, and we can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” Trump told reporters, saying the U.S. is leading China in the AI race.
In respective X posts, Trump ally Elon Musk, who runs xAI, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman both agreed with Amodei’s call for more safeguards and a slowdown in the pace of AI advancements.
Data center backlash and stark warnings
Trump’s comments came as many Americans take issue with the rapid buildout of AI infrastructure. A recent NBC News Decision Desk poll found that 69% of respondents oppose construction of AI data centers in their area, and the topic has been thrust into the center of the 2026 midterm elections.
Trump has been a staunch advocate for AI and data centers. He said in August that American communities should accept data centers unless they want to be “backwards and poor” and that “China could not be happier” about opposition to them. “Let Data Reign,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
Alarm about the potential harm from AI grew recently when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, stating that the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon said Sept. 8.
In his essay, Amodei compared AI to curing cancer, writing that he survived an early-stage diagnosis and his father died of a disease that was cured just a few years after his death. “Carefully wielded, AI can be the latest in a long line of technological miracles that have uplifted and ennobled humanity,” Amodei wrote. But he also warned of its risks.
On Sept. 10, Anthropic, which operates Claude AI models, released a threat intelligence report covering the prior eight months that said the company “disrupted operations in which threat actors tried to use Claude for malicious activity.”
Contributing: Joey Garrison, USA TODAY; Reuters
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