Trump warns US must accelerate AI development to compete with China

Donald Trump has a simple theory of AI: whoever wins it, wins. He said so multiple times during remarks made at his golf resort in Doonbeg, Ireland on September 13, 2026, and the repetition was clearly intentional. The president was responding, directly, to a wave of appeals from some of the most prominent names in technology asking the administration to pump the brakes on frontier AI development. His answer was an unambiguous no. The push for a pause that Trump rejected One day before Trump’s remarks, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly called for a temporary halt on frontier AI development, arguing that safety infrastructure needs time to catch up with the technology’s capabilities. Sam Altman and Elon Musk were among the other notable figures lending weight to the appeal. Trump was not persuaded. He dismissed safety concerns as overblown and signaled that while some limited regulatory caution could be considered, the pace of development itself was not up for negotiation. The framing he offered was geopolitical, not technical. The US is currently leading China in AI, he said, and his intention is to keep it that way. Slowing down, in his view, is equivalent to handing that lead t...