White House Isolated in Rejecting Global AI Safety Rules

Summary

This opinion article argues that the White House and its allies are increasingly isolated in insisting that US AI development should accelerate without governments setting common rules. At the UN General Assembly and during meetings involving President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the administration said US companies lead AI, the US intends to preserve that position, and Washington rejects international efforts to restrain the technology. Trump called for leaving AI “exactly where it is,” while Xi said responsible development is necessary; Chinese officials also backed a global governance framework. White House science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios rejected such efforts in a UN address, calling them an “intervention.” The article says that without US support, international arrangements may be limited to nonbinding rules and best practices, while frontier labs develop voluntary testing and safety schemes amid intense competition. It reports that AI companies are closer to the UN position than to Trump’s, supporting coordinated “AI pacing” and arguing that companies cannot define responsible AI use by themselves. French official Jean-Noël Barrot said the international community needs a common framework for frontier-model risks at a UN meeting attended by executives from OpenAI, Anthropic and Hugging Face. Polling cited by the article says Americans are skeptical that beating China requires unrestricted acceleration and are concerned about effects on jobs and livelihoods, with those concerns crossing party lines. This leaves congressional Republicans divided: some support safety measures and bipartisan regulation, while Trump opposes slowdowns. Senator Todd Young asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to convene National Security Council meetings on threats such as AI-enabled attacks on critical infrastructure, while still arguing that US leadership requires understanding emerging risks. Trump’s allies counter that safety campaigns may serve regulatory capture by helping large firms shape rules they can afford to follow, and they dismiss “doomerism” as speculative. The article presents Trump’s central argument as avoiding any policy that could give China’s cheaper open-source models an advantage. It also notes that a Google, Anthropic and OpenAI safety coordination group is taking shape.