Trump won't slow AI; Anthropic delays IPO

The debate opened with a departing Anthropic researcher's warning and CEO Dario Amodei's call to rein in the AI race, and it has now reached the White House. President Donald Trump entered talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and said neither is interested in slowing AI development, adding that China's position is the same. For the writers, that refusal is the problem: AI, in Tim Beyers's framing, remains a nascent market much like the internet before Section 230, the law that set norms of liability and made it safer to build internet businesses.

The two writers disagree on the remedy. Beyers says regulation is needed to create norms for a functioning market, while Jason Hall argues it should not happen too quickly — his fear is not runaway products but that regulation anoints Anthropic, OpenAI and other frontier leaders as de facto winners before they have proven themselves viable. He points out that far more money is flowing in as capital and debt than as customer revenue, and that a healthy market must include spectacular failures.

What happens next hinges on whether guardrails actually arrive and how investors read them. Jason Moser can see a world where a more deliberate approach is received well and lengthens the cycle, and a world where the talk is mostly bluster — a question sharpened by Anthropic's reported IPO delay from October to November and OpenAI's decision to rule out an IPO in 2026.