Trump Says AI's Only Guardrail Is a "High IQ President"

On September 14, Trump called AI safety a hoax and said the only guardrail AI needs is a "high IQ president." Vance said it felt weird that frontier labs keep begging the government to regulate them. Days later, Jensen Huang put Trump on speakerphone on stage at the All-In summit, where Trump called the AI fears a hoax again. Jensen's own position is that pausing and pacing are things the labs can do voluntarily. With Trump and Xi both in New York for the UN this week, the White House and the labs asking to slow down have rarely been further apart. Pierce and Rich trace how we got here, from the original pause letter to the Pacing the Frontier campaign. Signing is gated to frontier-lab email addresses, and only one of their friends did. They also get into what the labs should actually slow down: RL environments and new architectures, not chips. Also: whether a lab-wide slowdown amounts to an illegal AI OPEC, and Bernie Sanders' ASI bill, which carries 20 years in prison and a "corporate death penalty" (nobody has seen the full text). Plus the awkward fact that most US startups run on Qwen, Kimi and GLM, and what a Trump-Xi deal on AI could realistically include.