Vance to AI leaders: ‘If you’re building Frankenstein, stop’

Vice President Vance weighed in on the ongoing AI safety debate Tuesday, pressing those behind the technology to be careful.

“The president, I think, is very rightly asking the question, why is it that the people who are at the frontier of the AI economy are throwing up their hands and saying, ‘Well, we’ve built Frankenstein,’ and the solution to Frankenstein, apparently, is to create a one-world governance structure for artificial intelligence?” Vance said Tuesday during an event for the “All-In Podcast.”

“What I would say to those people — if you’re building Frankenstein, stop, or maybe build, you know, if the cat is out of the bag, then build the defensive mechanism against Frankenstein,” he added.

President Trump on Monday defended his approach to AI , stating that the only protections required are a strong president amid calls for safety guardrails around the technology.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things.’”

Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that AI development must be slowed to give space for the implementation of necessary risk prevention safeguards, with fellow tech moguls Sam Altman and Elon Musk backing him up.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote in a blog post. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

The Anthropic CEO recommended that AI companies quickly undertake measures aimed at “pacing” the development of models and warned of potentially grim consequences if the technology does not have brakes.