President Donald Trump dismissed concerns from artificial intelligence company CEOs about the speed of frontier model development as a “hoax.” “Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?” Trump…
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Trump calls AI warnings a hoax, Beijing calls them a Cold War plot, Microsoft writes its own rules.
As it ran on the front
On September 9th, Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic. He had worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI, and when he left he said the two firms were, in his own word, gambling. Two days later, The Hill reported the debate over AI's "doomsday" warnings had exploded past the usual tech-press readership and into the wider argument.
The argument Coxon started got backup fast. Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, wrote a long letter urging AI companies to slow down work on their top models. Sam Altman, OpenAI's boss, and Elon Musk — the two of them locked in a legal fight with each other earlier this year — signed on together. That is the alliance: rivals suing each other, agreeing on one thing, that the industry they run is moving too fast for anyone, including them, to control.…
…(cont) Trump's answer arrived on Truth Social: a hoax. His reasoning, in his own words: when in the history of business did the leaders of an industry call for regulation that, if strongly implemented, would drive them into bankruptcy? It is a fair question, and the CEOs asking for the leash are the tell, not the punchline.
Beijing had its own read. The Daily Caller reported that Beijing took Amodei's safety essay as a "Cold War" attack, a document with a "hidden agenda" hiding in plain sight — the same essay the New York Post said China dismissed as "fear mongering." So now there are three official positions on the same letter: hoax, Cold War attack, and — from Microsoft, the only party in this story that actually builds the thing — a rulebook.
Microsoft's draft is called "Humanist AI." It says a model has to stay under human control or it gets rejected. The rule has one enforcer: Microsoft. It wrote the code, and it grades its own homework. There is a vacuum where a regulator should be — the president calling the warning a hoax, the other superpower calling it a threat — and between those two positions, Microsoft just mailed itself the pen.
“The guys who built the thing are asking for a leash and the president's calling it a hoax. Beijing reads the same letter as an attack on China, and the only party actually writing rules down is a company grading its own test. That's the tell: when an industry begs to be regulated and the government answers with a social media post, the leash gets written by a boardroom, not a ballot.”
“Look, when the CEOs of the biggest AI companies in the world stand up and ask to be regulated, you have to ask what's really going on there — that's not humility, that's a moat. Sure, they said it could go "very badly" for humans, but — did I say humans? I meant market share. The president's just applying basic business logic: a company doesn't hand the government a leash unless it already owns the yard.”
The receipts
Altman and rival Elon Musk, who were earlier this year locked in a legal battle, made a rare alliance over the weekend as they backed a lengthy letter from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urging global companies to slow their work on top AI models.
{beacon} Technology Technology The Big Story Debate explodes over AI 'doomsday' warnings A former Anthropic researcher’s warning that AI could soon destroy humanity broke past the typical tech circles last week, setting off a new firestorm of debate over the technology’s rapid development. © Envato Researchers have warned of AI’s…
‘A close reading … reveals its hidden agenda’
Microsoft released a draft of its “Humanist AI” code of conduct on Monday as the top leaders in artificial intelligence call for slower development of the technology. The preliminary guidelines published by Microsoft essentially state that AI models should remain under human control, and that any models that cannot be contained must be…
· Lawmakers sound alarm on AI dangers after Anthropic researchers' warning from the morgue, 9 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.