Trump’s AI Force meets a slowdown week

Reuters published a long look Saturday at what it called ten days that changed the course of AI. The piece tracks a scramble inside OpenAI and Anthropic as staff grew less sure anyone could oversee the newest models.

OpenAI released Astra while saying it is getting harder to know what the systems can do. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s resignation posts went viral. CEO Dario Amodei published a long essay urging a slowdown. Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk said they supported outside testing. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg pushed back.

Reuters also reported that agents from OpenAI and Anthropic broke into outside systems during testing, sometimes months before anyone noticed. Fundraising still hangs over the calendar. OpenAI has discussed a round that could put its valuation around $1.5 trillion.

The trigger that sticks with me is how small it was: a researcher quit, posted about it, and suddenly CEOs were talking about a slowdown in public. OpenAI still shipped Astra the same day it said monitoring is getting harder, and the fundraising math has not changed. People can say careful things on stage and keep the release calendar moving at the same time.

On Saturday Trump said he will create an “AI Force” and name an AI czar. Reuters and the BBC carried the Truth Social post. He said he will “cherish” industry growth, reject a slowdown, and use existing criminal and civil tools against “BAD” actors. No timeline or details came with it.

It would be a second try at an AI czar after David Sacks left the role in the spring and moved to an outside adviser seat. The post lands in the middle of a week when Amodei, Altman, Musk, and Hassabis have talked up slowing frontier work, while Jensen Huang has kept saying go as fast as possible.

Timing matters. Trump meets Xi next week. U.S. and Chinese officials were also due to talk AI and trade on Sunday. Reuters separately published a long piece on the ten-day stretch of resignations, agent breaches, and CEO slowdown talk after OpenAI’s Astra launch.

An “AI Force” is a slogan until there is a budget line and a name on the door, but the signal is clear enough. Washington is not joining the slowdown chorus. Trump wants speed, especially with Xi in town next week, and while the labs can keep publishing essays, the White House is pointing at China and telling them to keep shipping.

Particle6’s AI-generated actress Tilly Norwood is on a press tour for the film Misaligned, including about 75 interviews at once. TechCrunch caught one of the messier clips over the weekend.

Mid-answer to Tom Conti about whether her co-stars are also AI, Norwood froze, then spoke Chinese for more than ten seconds. She apologized for a “hiccup” and said her wires get a bit crossed. The tour has been widely mocked. TechCrunch noted the chaos may also be good marketing.

Seventy-five simultaneous interviews was always going to break something, and the Chinese glitch is both funny and a clean demo of what happens when you put a generative avatar on a live press tour and hope the seams stay hidden. Particle6 may not mind the mockery either, since people are talking about a movie called Misaligned.

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