Opinion

Trump's AI race with China could become the biggest mistake of our time

America cannot consider AI warnings from tech leaders in a vacuum. China changes the calculation

By Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis, (ret.) Fox News

Published September 16, 2026 7:00am EDT

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'SICK CONSPIRACY': Trump calls AI fears a 'hoax' as tech leaders urge caution

President Donald Trump and administration officials push back on AI concerns and calls for regulation, warning the U.S. cannot afford to lose the AI race to China.

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In less than two weeks, President Donald Trump will welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping to Washington. Trump says AI will be a major topic of their September 24 talks and insists America must stay ahead of China. But the race has acquired a second, more dangerous dimension: some of the people building the world’s most powerful AI systems now warn they are advancing faster than humans can safely control them.

Jacob Coxon, a researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic last week with a warning: Competition among frontier labs is driving ever more powerful systems forward before researchers know how to keep them reliably under human control. Coxon told WIRED that colleagues described the next year or two as "crunch time for humanity."

Days later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei went further. In an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," he argued the industry must deliberately slow how fast it increases model capabilities so safeguards can catch up. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," Amodei wrote, proposing independent evaluators embedded inside frontier labs, coordinated safety standards among democratic nations, and eventually international arrangements covering the most dangerous capabilities. He did not call for halting AI development.

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What began as an Anthropic warning quickly became a rare convergence among rivals. OpenAI’s Sam Altman endorsed Amodei’s call for independent evaluators. Elon Musk responded simply, "Dario is right." Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis backed the same direction, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that superintelligence that does not help humanity and does not remain under human control is not worth pursuing.

AI EXTINCTION WARNINGS DOMINATE HEADLINES AFTER EX-ANTHROPIC EMPLOYEE'S VIRAL........

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