White House isolated as it brushes off AI safety

The White House and its allies are isolated in insisting that AI development in the United States must accelerate without governments setting ground rules. Writing for Semafor, Ashley Gold reported that at the UN General Assembly in New York and in meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Washington this week, President Donald Trump's team was clear: US companies lead in AI and reject any international attempt to rein in the technology.

Trump says leave AI "exactly where it is"

Trump's call to leave AI exactly where it is contrasts with Xi, who said responsible AI development is necessary; other Chinese officials said this week that they support a global governance framework. White House science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios rejected global efforts in a UN address that he called an "intervention." Without official US support, any such agreement will be hard to execute, leaving nations to set nonbinding rules without the buy-in of the biggest companies' home country.

Companies side with the UN

Even AI chief executives are more aligned with the UN than with Trump. Companies are pushing for coordinated "AI pacing" and say they cannot set the standards for responsible AI use on their own. A UN national security meeting on AI, attended by the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face, was chaired by French official Jean-Noel Barrot. "The international community will need to establish a common framework to manage the risks associated with frontier AI models," he said. Frontier labs are pushing self-regulatory schemes to agree on testing standards.

Republicans caught in the middle

Polling shows Americans are largely skeptical that the US must beat China at AI development, and many worry the technology is moving fast enough to threaten their jobs and livelihoods, with concerns cutting across party lines. That leaves congressional Republicans in a strange position: they advocate AI safety and sponsor bipartisan legislation to regulate AI while their party leader presses the gas. Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to convene National Security Council meetings with cyber experts and AI developers about threats including possible AI-enabled attacks on critical infrastructure.

What Trump's allies say

Trump's allies often see ulterior motives in the push for stricter AI safety rules. Some argue that companies as big as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic are seeking "regulatory capture" by shaping legislation only they could comply with. Others dismiss "doomerism" as hysterical and speculative. But the president's core message is simple: the US should do nothing that might give China, with its cheaper open-source models, an advantage in the AI race. Meanwhile, the AI safety coordination group formed by Google, Anthropic and OpenAI is taking shape, The Information reports.