A rare moment of agreement broke out among some of Silicon Valley’s biggest rivals this week, when Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind leaders all signaled support for slowing down artificial intelligence development. But in Washington, the reaction was far less enthusiastic. President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson pushed back hard, framing any pause as a dangerous gift to Beijing in the ongoing US China AI competition. The clash lays bare a widening gap between the people building the most powerful AI systems on Earth and the politicians who decide how, or whether, to regulate them.