Vice President JD Vance called out major AI executives Monday for pressing Washington to impose stricter rules on their own industry, warning that their push carries hidden risks.
Vance, 40, spoke with reporters at Joint Base Andrews before boarding a flight to the Kansas City area, where he was scheduled for public events. His remarks landed amid a growing chorus from some of the sector’s most prominent figures who want federal regulators to slow development timelines and install stronger oversight mechanisms.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief Sam Altman, Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis and xAI founder Elon Musk have all publicly advocated for greater government involvement in policing artificial intelligence. Their unified position has drawn unusual attention given the typically competitive relationships among those companies.
“I have to say, just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them,” Vance told reporters. “It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a trojan horse.”
President Trump, 78, voiced similar suspicion Monday through a post on his Truth Social platform, suggesting that executive leadership alone provides adequate protection against runaway AI systems.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. Has that, in spades!,” he wrote.
Trump has consistently portrayed AI advancement as an international competition with China, framing regulatory hesitation as a strategic vulnerability rather than a safeguard. He returned to that theme Monday with characteristic intensity.
“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!,” he posted. “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!,” he said.
The alarm from Amodei, Altman, Hassabis and Musk follows a stark warning issued by Anthropic researchers, who projected that advanced AI systems could pose existential threats to humanity by 2030 if development continues unchecked. That timeline has fueled urgent calls for mandatory safety protocols and potential development pauses.
Vance’s skepticism reflects a broader tension within the administration between competing impulses: addressing legitimate safety concerns while maintaining American dominance in a technology widely seen as economically and militarily decisive.
The vice president’s “Trojan horse” framing suggests he views industry-backed regulation as potentially designed to protect incumbents rather than the public, a critique sometimes leveled at regulatory capture efforts in other sectors.
Neither Vance nor Trump offered specific alternative policies Monday beyond existing criminal and regulatory frameworks, leaving open how the administration plans to address the Anthropic researchers’ extinction risk scenario without the industry-requested slowdown.
The Kansas City trip comes as the White House continues refining its posture on emerging technology ahead of anticipated congressional debates over AI legislation this session.