Bessent Tells AI CEOs Seeking Regulation to 'Slow Down'

"Well, then they should slow down."

That is how US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking on The Axios Show on October 3, answered a question about frontier-lab CEOs publicly asking Washington for AI regulation. He then compared those executives to Hannibal Lecter. "It's kind of like Hannibal Lecter: stop me before I kill again," Bessent said.

The remarks follow September calls from Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk to slow work on the most advanced models, and a warning from Bill Gates that AI could cause a billion deaths. Bessent cast the public warnings as empty posture. "I believe that we have to be prepared for every occasion. But on the other side, I think this alarmism without solutions by some of the AI community, that's not leadership."

He also made clear what he does not want Washington to become. "We cannot say, 'Oh, we absolve you of responsibility, and the government's going to take responsibility,'" he told Axios, signalling the federal government will not act as a liability shield for frontier labs.

On China, Bessent said Chinese AI models operate at "80%, 90% as powerful" levels compared to US systems but without comparable safety safeguards. He met Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in September to discuss risks including rogue agents and non-state misuse, and the US proposed an incident warning system between the two governments. Trump subsequently rejected pursuing formal AI safety cooperation with China.

The comments land in a stretch where lab policy is shifting internally: our tracker flagged this week that OpenAI and Anthropic researchers are now steering company policy on safety questions. Who in Washington writes rules if the labs will not is a question Bessent did not answer in the interview.