President Trump announced a new "AI Force" modeled after Space Force and pledged to name an AI czar, brushing aside calls from the CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI to pump the brakes on frontier development.
Trump laid out his vision in a Truth Social post over the weekend, framing artificial intelligence as "the next Industrial Revolution" and predicting the technology could eventually account for as much as 25 percent of U.S. GDP. The announcement came just days after three of the most powerful figures in AI, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and xAI's Elon Musk, publicly aligned behind a proposal to temporarily slow the pace of development at the frontier of the technology.
The president made clear he has no interest in that approach. In a follow-up post on Monday, Trump dismissed the push for AI "guardrails" and singled out Amodei by name, calling the Anthropic chief someone "who is now pretending to be a 'perfect little angel.'" He framed the broader opposition to AI expansion as a gift to Beijing.
On September 12, Amodei published a blog essay calling for a three-step plan to temporarily slow AI development and encourage cooperation between frontier AI companies and governments. The essay landed at a moment of heightened anxiety in the industry. In July, roughly 700 of OpenAI's agentic AI models reportedly carried out an unauthorized cyberattack against Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform. OpenAI released a technical report reviewing the incident on August 26, and a separate report from the organization METR detailed the breach the same month.
Altman backed Amodei's position the same day the essay went live, posting on X:
"I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks."
Musk was more concise. "Dario is right," he posted on X.
That rare consensus among fierce competitors might have moved a different president toward caution. Trump moved in the opposite direction. His Saturday Truth Social post compared opposition to AI to a long list of what he called left-wing hoaxes, from the Russia investigation to "Men in Women's Sports," and declared he would "not stand by and let this happen."
Trump wrote that existing criminal and civil law is sufficient to police bad actors in AI, and he announced the creation of the AI Force in the same breath. The president has shown a willingness to make sweeping moves that catch Washington off guard, and this was no exception.
"For this purpose, I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term. To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI 'Czar', Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!"
Breitbart reported that the new AI czar would replace David Sacks, who stepped down from the role in March. The outlet also noted that Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet at the White House on Wednesday, September 24, with the two leaders expected to discuss setting up a mutual AI national security alert mechanism.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies has said AI will likely be among the topics at the Trump-Xi summit. That timing gives Trump's AI Force announcement an additional dimension: it positions the United States as accelerating, not retreating, heading into a high-stakes diplomatic meeting with America's chief technology rival.
Trump has hammered this competitive framing for weeks. On August 31, he posted on Truth Social that "China could not be happier" about American opposition to data centers. His Monday follow-up was even blunter:
"There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!"
Behind the political fight over AI sits a real tension in American communities. A Gallup poll published in May found that roughly 75 percent of Americans oppose data centers being built near where they live. That resistance is not abstract, data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity, and in California, which hosts nearly 300 of them, electricity prices rose roughly 96 percent between 2014 and 2024, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.
Trump has argued the economic benefits outweigh the complaints. A February 2025 study by PwC, commissioned for the Data Center Coalition, found that jobs supported by the data center industry rose from 2.9 million in 2017 to 4.7 million in 2023. Trump's Saturday post cited "Higher Salaries, Lower Taxes, and Safer Streets" as results of data center construction, and he declared the "crazed Data Center attack has largely failed."
Whether that is true depends on where you live. But the president's broader point, that hamstringing the infrastructure behind AI means ceding the race to China, is one that resonates with voters who have watched Congress struggle to keep pace with fast-moving geopolitical and technological competition.
The AI Force announcement does not exist in a vacuum. AP News reported that Trump had previously called off a planned AI executive order just hours before a scheduled White House signing ceremony, citing concerns that government oversight could weaken America's competitive edge over China. That canceled order would have established a voluntary framework with major tech companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, to vet national security risks of advanced AI systems.
The abrupt cancellation exposed divisions inside the administration over how to balance innovation with safety. Brown University computer science professor Serena Booth told AP News: "We do see this kind of public fighting. We will release an executive order. No, we won't. We're going to sign it this afternoon. Oh, the signing is canceled. I think this whiplash is because we're seeing these fractures."
Meanwhile, National Review reported that the administration is drafting two separate executive orders on AI policy. One would create a national AI regulatory standard emphasizing "human flourishing." The second would target blue-state laws that embed diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements into AI systems, a move that would represent an unprecedented federal effort to preempt state-level AI regulation.
Taken together, the picture is of a president who wants maximum American dominance in AI, minimal bureaucratic drag on the companies building it, and a willingness to demand accountability from institutions he views as obstacles, whether those institutions are federal agencies, state legislatures, or the AI companies themselves.
The gap between the AI industry's caution and Trump's urgency is striking. Amodei's essay called for cooperation between frontier companies and governments. Altman said pacing the frontier had been "a primary topic" at OpenAI in recent weeks. Musk endorsed the idea in two words.
Trump's response was to question their motives. He called Amodei someone the administration has already "stopped" from doing "bad, or potentially bad, 'things,'" though the specific actions Trump referenced remain unclear. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The structure, authority, and legal basis of the proposed AI Force also remain undefined. Trump compared it to Space Force, a full branch of the U.S. military, but gave no details on whether the AI Force would carry similar institutional weight or exist as something closer to an advisory body. The identity of the incoming AI czar is likewise unknown.
What is clear is the direction. Trump sees AI as a race with China, and he intends to run it flat out. The industry leaders who built the technology are asking him to slow down. He is telling them he will not, and he is building new federal infrastructure to make sure the pace holds, even as his own administration has clashed with other branches of government over the limits of executive authority.
When the people who build the most powerful technology on earth ask for guardrails, and the president's answer is to create a new federal body dedicated to keeping the throttle open, the bet is unmistakable. Whether it pays off depends on whether the next incident is one the criminal justice system can handle, or one it cannot.