Why the midterms and China fears will complicate action in Washington to regulate AI

Pressure is mounting on Washington to make a real effort to tackle the dangers of rapidly developing artificial intelligence, but events on the political calendar are likely to make any debate slow and complicated.

President Trump, for his part, appears to be hardening his position that policymakers should stay on the sidelines.

With lawmakers focused on the midterm elections and Trump himself gearing up for a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping this month, meaningful action appears unlikely to even be fully debated before winter, though the House is set to vote this week on AI data center costs.

"Congress is a deliberative body [and lawmakers] need to catch up," House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday in one of many signs in recent days that any action will be slow.

In a flurry of comments over the past five days, Trump has repeatedly downplayed the need for AI regulation.

Many of the calls for new government safeguards, he said, were coming from "negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up."

He went further in a Truth Social post on Monday , saying no guardrails are needed if he is president and criticizing Anthropic ( ANTH.PVT ) CEO Dario Amodei, who kicked off a new conversation about regulating AI in an essay this weekend .

"The Trump Administration has stopped AI 'people' from doing bad, or potentially bad, 'things,' like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a 'perfect little angel,'" Trump wrote.

The president even brushed off worries of AI leading to human extinction, saying, "I don't have any" concerns about that. He also pushed back on the notion that he is downplaying the dangers and maintained that AI would be "more good than bad by a lot."

Trump's remarks about AI are highly focused on China, with Xi's state visit set for next week.

"We're leading China in AI, we're the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way," he said in response to a question on AI regulation that didn't mention China.

Xi's visit next week may touch on AI guardrails for both countries, but there is skepticism that China will abide by any constraints. Many observers argue that China's AI ambitions are a bigger threat than warnings from the US tech community about a possible loss of control.

There is now only "a 24-36 month window for the United States to make preparations for a Chinese AI industry that is no longer compute-constrained," Ryan Fedasiuk and Satvik Pendyala at the American Enterprise Institute wrote in a recent paper.