White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is trailed by reporters as he departs after a live television interview outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 28, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
President Donald Trump's aides are privately pressing him to reverse course on artificial intelligence with a dramatic prime-time address, according to a claim from veteran journalist David Shuster that no other outlet has yet confirmed.
In a thread posted to X, Shuster wrote that White House aides want Trump to address the nation within three days and brand parts of the AI boom a grave danger.
"I'm told WH aides are advising Trump to give a national TV address in the next 72 hours, declare certain aspects of the AI race an 'imminent threat to humanity,' and announce regulations pausing the things Tech companies want paused," Shuster posted. He added that the pauses would not necessarily hand the lead to China, meaning Trump could act without abandoning his goal of American AI dominance.
The sell, according to Shuster, is as much political as technical.
A pause would match what the public and AI companies overwhelmingly want, he wrote, and would let Trump declare he is "saving humanity." Shuster went further in his own view, arguing the stakes dwarf any trophy Trump might covet.
"Give Trump the Nobel or whatever prize he wants. If AI is as dangerous at tech companies say, with a 10% - 50% chance the next breakthroughs go out of control and kill all humanity within the next few years, who cares what award Trump gets. Just make the right decision now," warned Shuster.
The claim is at odds with Trump's own remarks. Asked last week as he left Dallas whether he feared AI could wipe out humanity, the president rebuffed any such notion.
"No, I don't have any," he said, adding that his worry was instead losing the race to China.
Trump doubled down over the weekend in Ireland, dismissing alarms as "things that won't happen," while House Speaker Mike Johnson rejected calls for emergency legislation, warning a slowdown would gift Beijing the advantage.
The reporting comes as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry to "pace the frontier," and a company researcher quit days earlier warning that developers "earnestly believe" AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade." OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk both support a slowdown, and even former President Barack Obama has pressed Democrats to make AI safety a campaign issue.