Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that policymakers should take AI leaders’ own safety warnings seriously as rapid advances intensify competition between the U.S. and China.
Blinken Says AI Warnings Demand Attention
“This is like the wizard is telling you something is rotten in Oz, we got to listen,” Blinken said on Bloomberg Television’s Balance of Power on Tuesday while discussing whether governments should place stronger guardrails around advanced AI.
Blinken later wrote that AI has “the potential for extraordinary good, but also for catastrophic consequences” if development outruns safeguards. He said America “does not need to choose” between leading China in AI and confronting “the profound risks” of the technology, adding, “We can do both, and I believe we must.”
Industry Leaders Push For Stronger Guardrails
His warning comes amid an unusually public debate inside the AI industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has urged frontier labs to slow capability gains so safety measures can catch up, proposing independent evaluators, shared standards and international coordination. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk have supported parts of that push. However, competition and China could make coordination difficult.
The geopolitical race has tightened. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index said the performance gap between the top U.S. and Chinese models narrowed to 2.7% as of March, with models from both countries repeatedly trading places near the top of rankings. That shrinking lead adds urgency to Washington’s debate over regulation and competitiveness.
Trump Rejects Slowdown As China Closes In
President Donald Trump has taken a different approach. He said Monday that the only AI “guardrails” needed are a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” and argued that slowing U.S. development would benefit China. Trump also called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “HOAX,” even as industry leaders press for stronger safeguards.
Federal agencies still maintain risk-management tools. NIST’s voluntary AI Risk Management Framework helps organizations identify and manage risks across the AI lifecycle, and the agency says it is revising the framework under the White House AI Action Plan.
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