Opinion | Trump, Suprisingly, Is Right This Time About Both China And AI

Updated: Sep 17, 2026 17:26 pm IST Published On Sep 17, 2026 17:26 pm IST Last Updated On Sep 17, 2026 17:26 pm IST

Published On Sep 17, 2026 17:26 pm IST

Last Updated On Sep 17, 2026 17:26 pm IST

For me, admittedly a layman but someone who has been closely following the progress of AI for some years, I find myself broadly agreeing with President Donald Trump on one part of the AI debate, even though I have been dismayed by many of his actions on the global stage since his return to power.

My agreement comes with a caveat, which I will come to in a bit.

Indeed, in my living memory, few technological developments have raised a more frightening question than the future of artificial intelligence. The debate has now gripped America. The tech people and policymakers taking decisions today could determine whether AI becomes one of humanity's greatest advances or a technology whose consequences we fail to control.

Trump says he is not worried that AI could eventually kill humanity. He is worried that his country could lose the AI race to China, which, according to him, is only a year behind America. And when he says, "Whoever wins AI, wins," he is not entirely wrong.

AI is already becoming an economic and strategic technology, capable of transforming everything from scientific research and medicine to defence and cyber warfare.

But in my view, there is a problem with the way the argument is being covered by the media. The choice cannot be between allowing AI development to continue at full speed or allowing China to overtake America.

There could be a third option.

We should slow down, as suggested by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, the most dangerous forms of AI development, and make China slow down with all of us.

Some of the biggest names in the AI industry have now backed Amodei's call for a slower pace of development. OpenAI chief Sam Altman has said progress should be rapid but slower, while Google's Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk have also backed the idea of putting greater emphasis on safety.

This is no longer simply an argument being made by AI safety campaigners outside the industry. It is increasingly coming from people inside the companies building the most powerful systems.

We Have Been Here Before

We should take the latest warnings seriously because they have come from inside the AI industry.

One of them came from Evan Hubinger, an AI safety researcher who worked at Anthropic. He has put the probability of AI eventually killing all humans within the next decade at more than 10 per cent. Another former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher, Jacob Coxon, has said that people working on these systems are "genuinely frightened" about the future of humanity.

Coxon went further. He resigned from Anthropic earlier this month, saying the industry was racing towards self-improving AI without adequate safeguards. His warning helped intensify a debate that had been largely confined to researchers and technology insiders.

Then came Amodei's intervention.

He has called for frontier AI companies to allow independent safety evaluators access to their systems, for leading companies in democratic countries to establish common safety standards, and for governments to work together internationally.

And now he has gone a step further.

Speaking in San Francisco at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference, Amodei was asked about his call to slow AI development. He acknowledged that it might be tempting for one company to "attack" its competitors, but argued that the more responsible approach was to establish standards across the industry.

"Let's make our practices better, let's recommit to........

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