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A rare moment of agreement broke out among some of Silicon Valley’s biggest rivals this week, when Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind leaders all signaled support for slowing down artificial intelligence development. But in Washington, the reaction was far less enthusiastic. President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson pushed back hard, framing any pause as a dangerous gift to Beijing in the ongoing US China AI competition. The clash lays bare a widening gap between the people building the most powerful AI systems on Earth and the politicians who decide how, or whether, to regulate them. Key takeaways Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an open letter calling to “pace the frontier” and slow the pace of AI capability gains. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis all voiced public support for Amodei’s proposal. Trump said the US is “leading China in AI” and wants to keep it that way, rejecting calls to slow down. Mike Johnson warned that rushing AI restrictions through Congress could become a “national security threat” and hand China the advantage. Amodei himself acknowledged that China’s willingness to follow any slowdown is the “toughest dilemma” facing his plan. AI Industry Leaders Advocate Slowing Down AI Development The push for restraint came directly from the top of the industry, not from outside critics. That distinction matters, since it’s rare for company chiefs racing to build ever-more-capable systems to publicly ask for the brakes to be applied. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s Proposal Amodei published a lengthy essay titled “We must pace the frontier,” arguing it was time to slow how quickly AI companies improve their most advanced models. The essay followed stark warnings from Anthropic’s own safety researchers about the technology’s growing potential for catastrophic harm, including one researcher who quit over fears that Anthropic…