Vance Wants to Safeguard Trump's Safeguard

The Trump administration named two safeguards against artificial intelligence this week. The first one was the President's own intelligence.

Both were answers to the same thing. Over the preceding weekend, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei had written: "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed him.

Donald Trump — Monday, September 14. Posted to Truth Social: "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 added that "The Trump Administration has stopped AI 'people' from doing bad, or potentially bad, 'things.'" He dismissed the idea of new AI guardrails entirely, calling efforts to limit the technology part of a "SICK conspiracy" that only China benefits from. It is one of five statements collected in Where World Leaders Stand on AI.

JD Vance — Tuesday, September 15. At an event for the All-In Podcast, the Vice President named a second one: the builders. "The president, I think, is very rightly asking the question, 'Why is it that the people who are at the frontier of the AI economy are throwing up their hands and saying, Well, we've built Frankenstein, and the solution to Frankenstein, apparently, is to create a one-world governance structure for artificial intelligence?'" What he would say to those people: "if you're building Frankenstein, stop, or maybe build, you know, if the cat is out of the bag, then build the defensive mechanism against Frankenstein."

Neither man proposed a rule.