fajar-ramadhan
US President Donald Trump has dismissed growing pressure to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development, saying the United States "is not going to be putting on brakes" on the technology. Speaking to reporters on Saturday as he departed the White House in Washington, DC, the president rejected calls from US lawmakers and senior executives at some of America's biggest technology companies who have warned that unchecked AI progress could put humanity at risk.
The comments came at the close of a three-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and they set out two positions at once: Washington will not regulate the pace of AI, and it will not share it with Beijing. Trump said the country should avoid cooperating with China on the technology, arguing that the US is far ahead and that opening up its work would surrender that advantage. "I would rather not integrate, because we're leading by a lot," he said, adding that a country in the lead does not open itself up to a rival.
Trump framed the safety concerns raised by researchers, executives and politicians as a familiar catalogue of hysteria. Drawing on issues he has previously dismissed as fabrications, including climate change and the investigation into whether his 2016 campaign colluded with Russian operatives, he accused those pushing for limits of wanting to freeze technology rather than protect people from it. Underlying the claim, in his view, is a strategic one: those who urge restraint, he said, are really trying to halt American progress at a moment when the US is ahead of China and intends to remain so.
The summit nevertheless produced one narrow piece of practical cooperation. The White House said on Friday that the two countries had agreed to establish a "bilateral communication channel" for AI incidents, a mechanism that would allow the two governments to notify each other of emerging risks. There was no immediate comment from Beijing on that announcement, and the channel is a far cry from the comprehensive AI agreement that US lawmakers and outside experts had been hoping for out of the Washington meeting.
That expectation had been widespread in the run-up to the summit, with many observers anticipating that Trump and Xi could use the occasion to announce joint guardrails, shared safety standards or a framework for managing advanced models. It did not happen. Trump, asked about the missing deliverable, indicated the topic occupied relatively little of the leaders' time, saying they "didn't spend that much time talking about it." What did dominate the AI portion of the conversation, he indicated, was his preferred terminology: the renaming of artificial intelligence as "super intelligence," or SI.
Trump announced on Tuesday that his administration would use the new term in official communications, and he said Xi appeared to like the rewording. Beijing responded carefully. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday that China "respects" Washington's change in phrasing, and a ministry spokesperson offered a message of openness, saying that AI technologies are continuously developing and that all parties can strengthen exchanges, discuss in-depth and seek consensus in light of the latest situation. The language — warm in tone, non-committal in substance — closely tracks the pattern of Chinese diplomatic responses that decline to accept American framing without confronting it.
On substance, Xi has struck a notably more measured tone than Trump. The Chinese president has said the technology must develop under human control, a formulation that contrasts with Washington's emphasis on velocity, secrecy and competitive advantage. The gap between those two positions is the central unresolved question left over from the summit, and it is likely to resurface: Xi is expected to meet Trump twice more this year.
The international pressure for guardrails has been building independently of the bilateral dispute. In his final address before the United Nations General Assembly, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged world leaders to put safeguards on AI, warning that development without accountability could put the world at risk. That appeal places the US in an unusual position, as the White House's resistance to limits runs against the position of its own Congress, its most prominent technology executives and a growing body of experts who argue that the harder questions about AI safety become, the more difficult they are to answer later.
For industry, the immediate effect of Trump's remarks is reassurance. A decision not to impose brakes means no near-term federal slowdown, and it preserves the operating latitude of firms racing to build and deploy the most capable systems. For Beijing, the refusal to integrate is double-edged: it closes off one avenue for technical dialogue, but it also confirms American assessment that the gap between the two countries' AI capabilities is wide and should be widened further.
The contrast with the single agreed outcome — an incident communication channel — highlights how thin the summit's AI legacy is. A hotline is a modest form of cooperation, and one that Beijing has not publicly confirmed. Everything beyond that, from shared safety testing standards to joint commitments on transparency, remains stalled, with the world's two largest AI powers moving in opposite directions on whether the technology should be slowed, shared or controlled at all.
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