Vice President JD Vance is skeptical of artificial intelligence CEOs calling for a development slowdown, comparing the calls to a “Trojan horse.”
Vance told reporters on Monday that President Donald Trump‘s administration is concerned about the speed at which frontier model development is happening but would prefer to “regulate smartly,” considering the benefits and risks of AI.
“Just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them,” he said at Joint Base Andrews before departing for Kansas. “It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse. So I think we just have to be careful about this.”
Vance, who has a fraud task force and fundraiser in Kansas on Monday, reiterated Trump’s argument that the United States has to have an advantage over China in the two countries’ “long-term AI race.”
“We want to make sure the United States, we do things smartly, but we stay ahead of the curve,” he said.
At the same time, Vance remained adamant that the public should not be “scared of anything.”
“I think we have to be mindful that there are risks,” he said. “There are downsides to anything, and that’s certainly true of AI.”
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Vance also expressed the administration’s preference that Congress work with the White House about next steps regarding AI.
“We obviously have a lot of folks on both sides of the aisle with a strong opinion, but any regulatory regime you’d like, ideally Congress and the White House, to agree on it, so that we actually are able to make it stick and so that we actually get some real consensus behind it,” he said.