President Donald Trump promised on 29 September 2026 that the US government would not limit artificial intelligence development. He made the pledge while unveiling America.gov, an AI chatbot intended to help Americans navigate government services, the Associated Press reported in its account of the event. His position differs from calls for caution by executives whose companies develop the technology.
Key points
- Trump said he would never stifle AI growth at the unveiling of America.gov.
- Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has called for leading firms to slow development.
- OpenAI said it delayed a model release over researchers’ safety concerns.
- Trump presented AI development as a contest between the United States and China.
Trump’s pledge at the America.gov unveiling
“I will never stifle the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” Trump said at the unveiling. The comparison was his forecast for AI, made alongside a promise about how his government would treat its development. He also said the United States was leading “by a lot”, an assessment he returned to when discussing China later on 29 September.
America.gov has a narrower stated purpose than the development pledge: it is intended to help people find their way through government services. Trump made the broader promise at its unveiling. The account of his remarks describes a presidential commitment, rather than a new law or a rule governing what AI developers may do.
The gathering had been planned before Trump made the pledge. AI Affairs previously reported plans for a 29 September meeting involving Trump, Johnson and technology executives. Trump also rejected an international agreement to manage AI risks, as AI Affairs reported earlier. At the unveiling, he put the emphasis on allowing development to continue.
Amodei and OpenAI call for caution
Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, called earlier in September for leading AI firms to slow their development. He was among the executives who attended a White House lunch with Trump on 29 September. Amodei’s appeal concerned the pace set by the companies building AI, while Trump’s promise concerned limits imposed by the US government. Both positions were part of the discussion in Washington that day.
OpenAI said on 28 September that it had delayed the release of its latest AI model because its researchers had raised safety concerns, the Associated Press reported. The decision concerned a release, rather than a government restriction on training or deployment. It was a concrete instance of a company holding back a model amid the debate over how quickly AI work should proceed.
On 29 September, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told CNBC that the company was devoting increasing attention to safety. “We are pacing our progress, which includes sometimes not training a model,” he said. Altman said the company needed to be able to make safety cases with confidence so that people would not have “a bunch of anxiety”. His description covered decisions about training as well as the release decision OpenAI had announced the previous day.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman also attended Trump’s lunch. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Elon Musk were there, as were Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. The meeting brought the president together with executives from companies involved in AI while their leaders were giving differing accounts of when development should advance or pause.
Trump frames AI as a US-China contest
Trump presented AI development as a competition between the United States and China. He said there would be a winner and a loser, with no “second place”, and claimed the United States was ahead. That account of the contest accompanied his refusal to limit domestic development. It also shaped how he spoke about working with China on AI, even after the two governments had agreed on a means of handling incidents.
The United States and China agreed during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington to establish a channel for AI-related incidents, the Associated Press reported. Trump expressed reluctance on 29 September to cooperate further with China. “I didn’t want to do anything, because we’re leading. Why would I want to do anything?” he said.
