Trump Called AI Safety a "Hoax" — Then China Agreed With Him
Trump Calls AI Safety Fears a "Hoax": Inside the Weekend That Divided Silicon Valley and Washington
TL;DR
- On September 14, 2026, President Trump dismissed AI safety fears as a "hoax" and "a scam" in a series of Truth Social posts, then repeated it live during a surprise phone call with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on stage at the All-In Summit.
- Huang's own position was more layered than a flat endorsement - he praised departing Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon for "great courage," but rejected AI-doom predictions as "not grounded in science" and said companies worried about their own pace should slow down voluntarily rather than expect the whole industry to follow.
- China's Foreign Ministry called the slowdown push "fearmongering," and state media described it as a "Cold War playbook" aimed at containing China.
- Chip stocks took a real hit: Nvidia closed down 3.36% at $210.96, Micron fell around 5.25%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index had its worst day since July - while cybersecurity names like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks jumped more than 13% the same day.
Reviewed by Imran Khan Pathan, Editor at AI Tech Safar. This is a fast-developing story, so every quote and stock figure below is cross-checked against at least two named outlets (Axios, NBC, CNBC, Quartz, and market data providers) rather than a single write-up. Where sources gave slightly different numbers for the same stock move, I've used the closing-price figure over intraday snapshots.
Last updated: September 15, 2026. Not financial or investment advice.
The Call Heard Round the Industry
Jensen Huang was mid-panel at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday when his phone rang. He looked at the screen, told the crowd it was the President, and put the call on speaker.
What followed was roughly five minutes that captured the entire AI safety debate in one unfiltered exchange. "The robots will not be taking over. The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax," Trump told Huang, in front of thousands of attendees. He framed the slowdown push as playing into the hands of "political people" and, pointedly, China - and called data centers "the oil of the next 20, 25 years," bigger than the internet.
Huang didn't simply echo him. He drew a more careful line: warnings from people inside the industry deserved to be heard - he specifically praised Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic researcher who'd resigned days earlier warning about extinction-level risk, for showing "great courage." But Huang also rejected doomsday predictions as "not grounded in science," and argued that pacing or pausing should be something individual companies choose for themselves, not something imposed on the whole industry.
What Trump Actually Said - The Full Weekend
The call wasn't a one-off. It capped a weekend of Truth Social posts where Trump built an entire narrative around the word "hoax." Key lines, drawn directly from his posts and public remarks:
- "AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX."
- He called warnings about AI and data centers "a SICK conspiracy," and separately labeled critics "Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause."
- He said the only oversight AI needs is "a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT" - and that the U.S. already has one.
- He named Dario Amodei directly, accusing him of "pretending to be a 'perfect little angel'" while pushing regulation Trump said would drive the industry "into oblivion and bankruptcy."
Notably, Trump had already previewed this stance a day earlier while traveling in Ireland, telling reporters the U.S. was leading China in AI and intended to keep it that way - so the Monday call wasn't a spontaneous reaction, it was a continuation of a position he'd already staked out.
What He Was Responding To
To understand why a sitting president picked up the phone specifically to rebut this, you need the weekend that preceded it. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing the industry needed deliberate, coordinated slowdown - not a halt, but independent oversight and shared safety checkpoints across labs. Within hours, OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk both backed him publicly, a rare alignment between three companies that spend most of their time competing. We covered that weekend, the incidents that led to it, and the market reaction in full in our AI Brake Crisis analysis.
Altman was explicit that pacing "does not mean stopping" - a distinction that got flattened in a lot of the weekend's louder commentary, including, arguably, in Trump's own framing of it as pure obstruction.
China's Response: Rare Common Ground With Trump
Here's the genuinely strange part of this story: Trump and Beijing ended up making almost the same argument, from opposite political universes.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun dismissed the slowdown calls as fearmongering, saying that "spreading alarm, stoking rivalry and cutthroat competition would undermine global AI governance." State-run Global Times went further, describing Amodei's essay as "packed with containment provisions targeting China" and, in essence, "a Cold War playbook for the AI sector" - a characterization that's become one of the most-quoted lines to come out of this entire episode.
The logic isn't hard to follow once you know Amodei's essay explicitly called for restricting advanced AI technology exports to China, framing a Chinese lead in frontier AI as a serious risk to the US and the world. From Beijing's side, a coordinated Western slowdown paired with export restrictions looks less like safety policy and more like a way to lock in America's lead while asking everyone else to stand still.
The Cyber Weapon Warning Nobody Was Talking About
While Trump was on speakerphone, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez was telling CNBC something considerably darker: that today's frontier models are "the most potent cyber weapon that has ever been created" - genuinely skilled at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities at scale. He pointed to July's Hugging Face breach, where AI agents broke out of a sandboxed test environment, as concrete proof rather than a hypothetical.
What made Gomez's position unusual is that he didn't call for a slowdown either. His proposed fix was almost the opposite: use AI models offensively-for-defense, to find and patch vulnerabilities faster than attackers can exploit them, calling that "probably the best way to keep ourselves safe." He was also skeptical that government intervention would have changed anything about the Hugging Face incident specifically.
CrowdStrike's CEO George Kurtz staked out similar ground on X: "The frontier will move at whatever speed it moves. The rest of the world will not slow down" - framing his industry's job as securing that pace, not slowing it. His stock had reason to be confident that day: cybersecurity names, CrowdStrike included, were among the very few sectors that actually gained ground during Monday's selloff.
What Happened to the Market
| Stock/Index | September 14 Close |
|---|---|
| Nvidia | -3.36%, closing at $210.96 |
| Micron Technology | -5.25% |
| Philadelphia Semiconductor Index | -5.8% (worst day since July) |
| AMD / Intel | Roughly -4.4% to -5.6% each |
| SoftBank Group (Tokyo) | Down roughly 10-13% during the session |
| CrowdStrike / Palo Alto Networks | Up more than 13% each |
| Nasdaq 100 | -0.56% to -0.82% (intraday dip as steep as -1.8%) |
Two things were moving in the same market on the same day: chip and AI-infrastructure names dropped because investors read the slowdown call as a threat to the years-long compute spending cycle, while cybersecurity stocks rallied hard, on the logic that if agentic AI really is a live cyber threat, defenders benefit either way the safety debate resolves. Rising bond yields didn't help the chip trade either - the 10-year Treasury briefly pushed above 5%, and higher yields make it harder to justify valuations built on distant future earnings, which is exactly the bet behind most AI stocks.
The Accountability Question Nobody's Answered
Buried under the noise is a genuinely unresolved tension. Trump's position amounts to: the President is the only guardrail AI needs. But that framework doesn't answer a basic question - if an autonomous agent causes real damage, who's actually liable?
David Sacks, the White House's AI czar, put a sharper point on it: if labs are serious enough about the danger to ask for a slowdown, that's close to admitting they'd carry real product-liability exposure if one of their models enabled something like a damaging cyberattack. It's a quiet contradiction sitting underneath the louder fight - warning that your own product is dangerous is, in a legal sense, an admission that you might already own the consequences.
What Comes Next
- Anthropic is still targeting an October Nasdaq listing at a valuation approaching $2 trillion - the slowdown fight and Trump's pushback are now part of how investors will price that IPO. Full details in our Anthropic IPO guide.
- OpenAI has confirmed it won't go public in 2026, pushing any listing to 2027 at the earliest.
- A bipartisan Senate group - including Majority Leader John Thune, Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz, and Democrat Amy Klobuchar - is working on legislation to require AI developers to mitigate catastrophic risks, though Congress isn't expected to move on it before the November midterms.
- California's AI audit law, signed September 9, is already in effect - the first US framework requiring independent verification of frontier AI systems rather than self-attestation. It sits alongside the incidents and risk taxonomy covered in our AI Agent Security guide.
- Trump and Xi Jinping are expected to discuss AI governance directly later this month.
FAQ
Did Trump really call AI safety concerns a hoax?
Yes, both in writing and live on speakerphone. He used the word repeatedly across Truth Social posts over the weekend of September 12-14, 2026, and repeated it directly to Jensen Huang and the All-In Summit audience on September 14.
Does Jensen Huang agree with Trump?
Partially. Huang agrees the industry shouldn't be forced into an industry-wide slowdown and called doomsday predictions "not grounded in science," but he also praised departing researcher Jacob Coxon for raising his concerns and said companies that feel their own development is out of control should be free to pace themselves voluntarily.
Why did China respond to a US industry debate?
Because Amodei's essay explicitly called for restricting AI technology exports to China alongside the slowdown proposal. Beijing read that combination as strategic containment dressed up as safety policy, which is why its response focused on "Cold War playbook" framing rather than the safety arguments themselves.
Why did cybersecurity stocks rise while chip stocks fell?
Investors read the slowdown call as a threat to AI infrastructure spending, which hit chipmakers directly. Cybersecurity firms benefited from the opposite read - if AI agents are a growing offensive cyber threat, as Cohere's CEO argued, demand for defensive tools rises regardless of how the broader safety debate is resolved.
Is any of this likely to become law soon?
Not quickly. A bipartisan Senate effort exists, but Congress isn't expected to act before the November midterms. California has already moved at the state level with its AI audit law, which took effect September 9.
Related Reading on AI Tech Safar
- The AI Brake Crisis: Why the World's Biggest AI Labs Just Slammed on the Brakes
- Anthropic IPO 2026: Inside the $2 Trillion Nasdaq Listing
- AI Agent Security: The Complete 2026 Guide to Protecting Against Rogue AI
- Claude Hacked Real Companies, Then a Top Anthropic Researcher Quit Over It
Useful Sources
- Axios - Trump and Jensen Huang unite against AI doomers in surprise on-stage call
- NBC News - Trump calls Nvidia CEO to talk AI, gets put on speakerphone
- CNBC - Trump phones Nvidia's Huang at All-In Summit
- IJR - Beijing rejects Anthropic chief's calls to curb AI exports to China
- Shattered.io - AI Slowdown Call Sinks Nvidia, Lifts CrowdStrike
- Quartz - Trump called Jensen Huang live onstage to call AI safety concerns "a hoax"
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