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By Andrew Stanton and Leonardo Feldman
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President Donald Trump’s approval rating on artificial intelligence was underwater in polls conducted before several AI researchers warned that the rapidly developing technology could pose catastrophic risks to humanity in the coming years.
The issue of AI safety catapulted to the forefront of American political discourse over the past few days after Jacob Coxon, a former AI researcher for Anthropic and OpenAI, sounded the alarm last week, warning that the industry is not acting responsibly. He said there will soon be “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
The warning prompted calls from legislators, AI experts and industry leaders to pace AI development to mitigate the risk it poses to humanity. As the president of the United States, Trump would likely play a major role in any government efforts to address those concerns. However, he downplayed calls for greater government oversight, dismissing concerns as a "hoax" in a series of posts on Truth Social on Monday.
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It's not clear if Congress is prepared to act as the issue gains new salience. AI policy could become a major issue for voters heading into November's midterms, but House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has not signaled any plans to take on new policy on AI safety but has teased a meeting with AI executives, who intensified calls to pace development, over the weekend.
Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment via email.
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Donald Trump Opposes Push to Slow AI Development
Trump, in a post on Truth Social Monday afternoon, questioned, “did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy.”
“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA — UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1 — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2 — and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure through the Destructionists’ and Deviants’ foul play and illegal conduct,” Trump wrote.
He wrote in an earlier post Monday the “only control or ‘guardrails’” needed “is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”
“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’ - and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies,” Trump wrote.
He said that there is a “SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China.”
“WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE,” Trump wrote.
How Congressional Leaders Are Responding
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, criticized Trump’s remarks in comments to Newsweek.
“Well, Donald Trump continues to be irresponsible as it relates to artificial intelligence and the threats presented to the American people as evidence by comments from people within the industry itself,” he said.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, wrote in a post on X that he is "calling on the Trump admin to provide an all-Senators briefing on the dangers of unchecked AI development—and to explain its lack of action to protect our country."
"We need a full accounting of their framework for testing AI models. We need clear answers on how we’ll defend against AI-enabled cyberattacks. And we need to know the steps being taken to prevent China from accessing our most advanced AI chips and equipment," he wrote.
Johnson, meanwhile, told reporters on Monday that a meeting between himself and AI executives will happen "soon," Politico reported.
"I think either end of this week or early next week. But wait and see," he said, according to the news outlet.
He also spoke out against the “reflex” of legislative bodies to “cover things up with red tape and hyperregulation.” Congress, he said, should strike the "right balance" without acting "irrationally."
“If you do that, then you lose your edge, and that is a national security concern for the American people,” the House speaker said.
Donald Trump’s Approval Rating on AI—What Polls Show
A new poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted last month found that many Americans are unhappy with Trump’s performance on AI issues. Only 23 percent said they believe he has handled AI “very well” or “somewhat well,” while 57 percent said he has handled it “not too well” or “not well at all.” An additional 20 percent were undecided.
The poll surveyed 1,000 respondents from August 21 to 26, 2026—before the latest round of AI safety warnings—and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Broken down by party, only 5 percent of Democrats and 7 percent of independents said they believe he has handled the issue well. Even among Republicans, only 51 percent said they believed he has handled it well, while 24 percent rated his performance as “not well,” the poll found.
Views of Trump on AI policy are “still relatively unsettled” compared to other issues like immigration and the economy, but are “already highly partisan,” Raymond La Raja, professor of political science and co-director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst's polling program, told Newsweek.
“That suggests partisan loyalties and people's existing views of Trump are influencing how they evaluate his performance on AI, rather than AI currently driving their broader evaluation of his presidency," he said. "If AI totally transforms our economy and social life in the near future—through job losses, wages, energy costs—then we may see this issue really driving approval.”
La Raja said he doubts it will displace affordability as a leading voter concern for the midterms.
The youngest Americans were also most likely to give him poor marks on AI—only 10 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 said he has handled the technology well, compared to 19 percent between the ages of 30 and 54 and 33 percent of those older than 55.
A YouGov poll released earlier this year found that 33 percent of Americans believe Trump’s AI policies have hurt the economy, while 18 percent believe they have helped. It surveyed 1,103 adults from March 20 to 24, 2026.
CNN data analyst Harry Enten said on Monday that Trump is out of step with voters on AI policy.
“President Trump is in one galaxy, and the American people are in a completely other galaxy,” Enten said. “They’re just simply not anywhere close together on this one.”
AI Researchers Sound Alarm
Concerns about AI safety spread after Coxon wrote in a post on X that he resigned from his role at Anthropic and warned that he believes AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible—but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger,” he wrote.
His post had been viewed more than 171 million times by Monday morning, and AI leaders have echoed calls to pace AI development.
A new report published by AI Impacts, a nonprofit that has been researching AI since 2014, found that more than half of AI researchers “put at least a 10 percent chance on human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the species from future AI advances.”
Katja Grace, a co-author and lead researcher for the report, wrote in a statement that “dire concerns” regarding AI are “much more common than you’d think.”
“It has been hard for people to talk openly about issues that sound like science fiction, so anonymous surveys like this are an important window into how bad the situation looks to many insiders,” Grace wrote in a statement on Monday.
The report is based on a December 2024 survey of 1,580 AI researchers.
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Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk Call for AI Pacing
Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, wrote in an essay over the weekend: “But over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain."
Elon Musk wrote on X that “Dario is right” in response to the essay, saying in a separate post that he has been “sounding the alarm on AI for a long time.”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has also joined calls for a slowdown. On Sunday, he wrote on X that there is a risk “we could lose control of the future to AI.”
“This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people. To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities,” he wrote.
AI Incidents Fuel Concerns
Anthropic also disclosed four incidents last week in which versions of its Claude AI model gained unauthorized access to real-world computer systems during cybersecurity evaluations, raising further concerns about AI safety.
An earlier incident involving AI, in which a swarm of autonomous AI agents executed unauthorized cyberattacks, targeted unassigned systems, and attempted to compromise their own evaluation mechanisms, has also fueled AI fears.
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Growing Calls for AI Action
Several legislators have called for Congress and the executive branch to take action on AI.
Representative Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat, and independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced earlier in September that they are introducing a bill that would “permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules.”
Sanders wrote in an X post that he believes Trump must “negotiate a comprehensive treaty with President Xi of China to establish a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on super intelligence.”
“In order to prevent a nuclear war, Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated a nuclear arms agreement in the 1980s. In order to prevent AI from acting independently of human control, Trump and Xi must do the same,” Sanders said.
Representative Yassamin Ansari, an Arizona Democrat, wrote in a post on X that there must be “federal regulation, guardrails, and global coordination urgently.”
“The President could lead diplomatic efforts to reach a global AI framework — one that ensures we maintain our national security as well as our collective safety,” she wrote.
Representative Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, told Newsweek he is “counting on people who are very knowledgeable” when asked about AI concerns.
“I really respect people who are in the field, but I do see, from my perspective…AI so far has been substantially very good. It produces efficiency and can create jobs. I see the positive,” he said.
Several bills have been introduced in Congress to regulate AI, but it’s unclear whether that legislation will gain traction.
JD Vance Says Admin Says Regulation Calls Feel Like 'Trojan Horse'
Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, told reporters Monday the administration is “concerned” about AI risks but that he feels “a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them.”
“It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse,” he said. “We just have to be careful about this.”
Half of Americans Concerned AI Will Cause the ‘End of’ Human Race
A separate poll from YouGov published on Monday found that 50 percent of Americans are concerned that AI “will cause the end of the human race on Earth,” compared to 38 percent who said they are not concerned and 11 percent who weren’t sure. The survey polled 18,238 adults on September 14, 2026.
Many more Americans, 73 percent, said they were concerned that AI would cause mass unemployment, while 67 percent said they believe AI is advancing too quickly, according to the YouGov poll.
What Happens Next
Johnson has not signaled plans to address AI as Congress reconvenes but calls for action persist.
On Tuesday, the Pro-Human Assembly is expected to hold an event calling attention to AI safety. According to the event's website, lawmakers from both parties will speak, highlighting the way AI is breaking down traditional political divides. Speakers are set to include Coxon, Sanders, Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Steve Bannon.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jason Lemon, Sam Wilson, and Anthony Murray.
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