TL;DR
Trump told the UN General Assembly the US will block any global AI governance framework, framing the race to AI dominance as winner-take-all and explicitly rejecting the cautious tone of leading AI CEOs.
What happened
- Trump addressed the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2026, declaring the US "totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control" AI.
- He rebranded AI as "super intelligence" on the world stage, days after running a social media poll asking followers to choose between "Superior Intelligence," "Extreme Intelligence," or "Supreme Intelligence."
- Trump dismissed AI safety concerns by comparing them to climate change warnings, calling both overblown and driven by the same alarmist voices.
- He explicitly rejected calls for regulatory "pacing" from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, arguing that whoever masters the technology first wins.
- His framing: "I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution."
Why it matters
- US opposition kills any near-term UN AI governance framework: without American participation, multilateral AI regulation has no enforcement backbone.
- The winner-take-all framing signals Washington will prioritize speed and dominance over safety guardrails, accelerating the race dynamic with China and the EU.
- Splitting from Altman and Amodei publicly is notable: the administration is now openly at odds with the CEOs of the two most prominent US frontier AI labs on the question of pacing and oversight.
- Comparing AI critics to climate alarmists sets a rhetorical template that could be used to delegitimize domestic regulatory proposals in Congress or at the FTC and FCC.
- For allied governments building AI policy, US non-participation in global standards forces a choice: align with Washington's deregulatory posture or risk market fragmentation.
What to watch next
- Whether the EU, UK, or a coalition of nations proceeds with a binding AI treaty framework without US involvement, and how Washington responds.
- Congressional reaction: any bipartisan AI safety bill now faces a steeper climb given the president's explicit anti-regulation stance on the global stage.
- How Altman, Amodei, and other frontier lab leaders navigate the widening gap between their public calls for oversight and the administration's posture, especially as they depend on federal contracts and export licenses.
Originally published on Present of AI, a daily source-linked AI news timeline. Read the full timeline or browse the open dataset.