President Donald Trump said Saturday that he is creating a new 'AI force' to 'watch over' AI development. At the same time, he said he will not 'in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry.'
Trump said the new effort will 'watch over' AI as it grows, but he did not provide further details about what the force would do.
His comments came one week after a group of leading AI executives called for government regulation and a slowdown in AI development until stronger risk-prevention measures are in place.
In an essay titled 'We Must Pace the Frontier,' Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed a three-pronged plan that, in his view, would strengthen safeguards so AI remains under the control of human engineers. One of those prongs called for the US government to regulate frontier AI labs 'for antitrust reasons.' The essay was boosted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Not everyone in the industry wants a slower, more regulated path. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and David Sacks, a presidential advisor on science and tech, said government regulation would put the US at a disadvantage with China and choke the growth of smaller AI companies. Sacks also said AI labs do not need the government and can coordinate a slowdown among themselves.
Trump said existing criminal statutes were sufficient to protect against incidents of misalignment, a term for when agents do things their human minders did not intend. He also called slowing AI development 'Hoaxes' generated by the 'Radical Left Dumocrats,' and said he intends to keep the US ahead of China and the rest of the world.
The math is simple: if Washington builds only more bureaucracy, founders get slower approvals and less room to ship. If it sets clear guardrails and gets out of the way, capital can keep moving into the firms building the next platform shift.
For founders, the real issue is not whether AI matters. It is whether the government treats it like a growth engine or a problem to be managed. Trump is signaling both watchfulness and speed, but the market will judge the policy by one thing: whether it protects customers without crushing the companies trying to build.
