Trump dismisses AI safety alarms as negative forces, but Anthropic and Google DeepMind leaders are publicly calling for a significant slowdown.
Page A11From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 15 September 2026
THE HOAX FILE
Vance calls AI warnings a Trojan horse the same week his president calls the danger a hoax
As it ran on the front
Let me be direct, because there's a lot of confusion out there. The president said the whole AI danger question is a hoax, and what he means is that the industry itself is on the other side of that sentence. On September 9th, Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic and accused both major AI labs of gambling with the public. Three days later, Sam Altman publicly backed Anthropic's own CEO in calling for the industry to slow the race down. So when the president got Nvidia's Jensen Huang on the phone this week and said the robots aren't taking over, the whole thing is a hoax, he was talking about the ind— he was talking about the very industry whose own executives had just spent the previous week disagreeing with him in public.
His vice president disagreed with him too, in the opposite direction. JD Vance called the warnings coming from AI leaders a "Trojan horse" — not proof of danger, but the danger itself, smuggled in by the people who built the thing. So the administration's position, delivered in the same week, is the hoax and the horse, and I am not going to stand here and tell you those two add up, because they d— they don't need to add up. That's not the job. The job is repeating both until one of them sticks.…
…(cont) The coalition asking Congress to slow this down is not a normal coalition. Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon are sharing a stage in Washington to push guardrails, which happens when people who agree on almost nothing agree on this one thing. House Republicans are still hunting for a regulatory path, which is why Vance had to go address the conference directly. Fox's own Liz Peek wrote this week that the alarm bells are ringing and the president needs to take them seriously — an instruction, printed in his own paper, to stop doing exactly what he is doing.
Universities are no cleaner. The Times reports they're warning students about the technology with one hand while adopting it with the other, which leaves the students confused about which hand to trust.
Here's the counterpoint, because there's always one. While Sanders gets top-lined as the threat, an industry-backed alliance is running a seven-figure ad blitz against him and AOC, while praising three Republicans for finding the "balance" between innovation and safeguards. The guardrail money is going toward protecting the guardrail's opponents. The hoax was never the danger. The hoax is who gets to decide there isn't one.
“They tell you there's no money for guardrails; there's money, it's just a seven-figure ad blitz aimed at the guy asking for them instead of at the problem. Sanders and Bannon don't agree on much, so when the far left and the populist right end up on the same stage begging Congress to slow this thing down, that's not a coincidence, that's every smoke detector in the house going off at once. The one man deciding whether that alarm gets acted on is the same one who just told Jensen Huang it's a hoax.”
“Look, all the president is saying is that we shouldn't panic, and panic is bad for markets, bad for innovation, bad for— why does everyone act like innovation is the enemy here. The Vice President calling the warnings a "Trojan horse" just means he's skeptical of the messengers, not the message, which, okay, is also what the president is skeptical of, so maybe it's the same thing, forget I said that. Regulating this fast, before Congress even understands the technology, just hands the advantage to China — which, yeah, that part might actually be true, ask Vance.”
The receipts
Vice President JD Vance is expected to address the regulation of artificial intelligence during a Tuesday appearance before the House Republican Conference. Vance is appearing as concerns over the rapid growth of AI have hit a fever pitch, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) faces pressure to stay in session to deal with AI ahead […]
That the leaders of the most powerful artificial intelligence companies are all calling for regulation shouldn’t be ignored. But big businesses calling on big government to cement their status as industry leaders isn’t new. And lawmakers should exercise extreme caution when attempting to regulate an industry they don’t understand…
While most lawmakers are saying it’s time to enact guardrails against AI, President Donald Trump is continuing to downplay the potential dangers. In a surprise on-stage call to the head of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, the president said, “The robots will not be taking over…The whole thing is a hoax.” Instead, he’s framing the AI arms race as…
"Who Decides" was launched by the New York state lawmaker who became one of the AI industry's chief targets when he ran for Congress on a platform focused on regulating the technology.
Alliance for a Better Future targets Bernie Sanders and AOC in new AI ads while praising three GOP lawmakers for balancing innovation and safeguards.
The poles of U.S. politics are coming together over AI. Sanders and Bannon will appear at the "Pro-Human Assembly" in Washington, D.C., to convince Congress to work faster to curb the impact of AI.
As A.I. upends education, university leaders have been all over the map about how to respond. It can be very confusing for students.
Vice President JD Vance called the warnings from AI leaders a "Trojan horse."
· Lawmakers sound alarm on AI dangers after Anthropic researchers' warning from the morgue, 9 Sep 2026
· Sam Altman backs Anthropic CEO’s call to slow down the global AI race from the morgue, 12 Sep 2026
· Anthropic CEO calls for slowing the AI race as safety warnings mount from the morgue, 12 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.