Rizky Amelia
Donald Trump has rejected growing pressure to slow or regulate the development of artificial intelligence, telling reporters as he departed the White House on Saturday that the United States has no intention of putting "brakes" on the technology. The comments, delivered on the South Lawn before the president boarded Marine One, set the United States against a widening chorus of US lawmakers, technology executives and international leaders who warn that unchecked AI development could pose serious risks to humanity.
Despite the mounting alarm, US members of Congress and chief executives at some of America's biggest technology companies have converged on the view that the pace of AI development needs to be moderated. Trump, by contrast, portrayed efforts to restrain the field as an attempt to hold back American progress at a moment of intense strategic competition with China.
The president went further, comparing the warnings about AI to a series of other alarms he has dismissed in the past, singling out climate change and the Russian interference investigation that examined whether his 2016 presidential campaign colluded with operatives. In remarks that drew criticism at home and abroad, he argued that those who want to slow AI development are, in effect, trying to halt the nation's technological momentum because the US is pulling ahead of its principal rival.
That competition with Beijing was a central theme of the trip. Having just concluded a three-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington, Trump said outright that the two countries should not pool their efforts on the technology. Explaining his reasoning, he indicated that the US is already ahead of China by a considerable margin and that American strength in the sector should not be shared. His comments suggest that Washington is now treating AI not as a field for joint governance, but as a source of strategic advantage to be protected.
Lawmakers and analysts had hoped the summit would produce a first-of-its-kind agreement on artificial intelligence between Washington and Beijing. That breakthrough did not materialise. Trump himself indicated that AI occupied only a small share of the discussions, acknowledging that the two sides did not devote much time to the subject during the high-level meeting.
The limited progress reflected in public messaging also drew a backlash in Washington and around the world, where critics described the gathering as a missed opportunity to establish even basic guardrails on a technology that is rapidly reshaping economies, militaries and information systems. The absence of a joint framework left the two powers with no agreed mechanism for handling the most consequential AI questions, from model safety to military applications.
What did emerge was modest. The White House said on Friday that the two countries had agreed to set up a bilateral communication channel for AI incidents, intended to allow the sides to exchange information when problems arise. The statement was notable, but Beijing offered no immediate response, and the channel's practical scope and authority were not detailed.
The contrast with the summit's ambitions was underscored by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who used his final address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday to urge world leaders to put guardrails in place. He warned that development without accountability carries the potential to put the entire planet at risk, echoing a refrain that has grown steadily louder as generative AI systems become more capable and more widely deployed.
A significant part of the US-China conversation, Trump suggested, centred not on the technical details of AI but on the terminology itself. The president announced on Tuesday that his administration would begin using the term "super intelligence", or SI, in official communications instead of the more conventional "artificial intelligence", saying Xi appeared to approve of the change.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded on Saturday that it "respects" Washington's switch in phrasing. A statement from an unidentified Chinese ministry spokesperson added that AI technologies are continuously developing and that all parties can strengthen exchanges, discuss issues in depth and seek consensus in light of the latest situation — language notably warmer than Trump's public rejection of cooperation.
Xi's own position on the technology has been markedly more cautious than Trump's. The Chinese president has argued that AI must develop under human control, a framing that sits uneasily beside the US administration's stated reluctance to impose limits and its decision to recast the technology under a more grandiose name.
The summit was not, however, the last word. Xi is expected to meet Trump two more times this year, and the president suggested the AI discussions with his counterpart were sufficiently promising that they would continue at future meetings. Those sessions will test whether the modest communication channel announced on Friday develops into anything more substantial, or whether the AI dialogue remains stalled by mutual suspicion.
For now, the administration's stance amounts to a declaration of competition rather than caution. Washington has declined to slow its own development, has rejected the idea of integrating its AI programmes with China's, and has instead rebranded the technology as a strategic national asset. That position leaves American regulators, Congress and the tech industry pressing for safeguards the White House has no plans to provide, and leaves the world without a US-China framework for keeping the technology in check.
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