AI Safety Burden Falls on Chief Executives as Trump Prioritizes China Race

President Donald Trump rejected calls from leading artificial intelligence (AI) executives to slow model development, arguing on Sunday that any pause would hand China the lead in a race the United States must win.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and former White House AI adviser David Sacks made versions of the same argument. An AI safety debate turned into a contest over China.

Congress Hands AI Safety to the Developers

Johnson told CNN's State of the Union that Congress has already set guardrails. The burden sits with the labs.

"…there is an obvious corporate responsibility that the people who are creating these models have to ensure that their products are safe."

He spoke a day after Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI urged an AI slowdown. No federal rule obliges any of them to follow through.

Sacks told the three chief executives to stop asking permission. He argued their caution is also commercial, since a damaging cyberattack would expose them to liability claims.