Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Monday, September 28, 2026
Trump Brought Venezuelan Gold to the U.S., but Refiners Won’t Touch It - The New York Times
Trump Brought Venezuelan Gold to the U.S., but Refiners Won’t Touch It
The administration is brokering deals in a notoriously corrupt industry, including one with a company that the United States deems a security threat.
In early March, as President Trump basked in the success of a military intervention in Venezuela, he joined Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the West Wing for a private celebration. A businessman also attended, and brought along a pile of gold.
The president looked approvingly at the 10 Venezuelan gold bars stacked in the Roosevelt Room, across from the Oval Office, White House officials recalled. Aides took photos and joked about keeping the gold.
Mr. Trump himself had once blacklisted Venezuelan gold, declaring that it destroyed the environment, poisoned people and financed gangsters and corrupt military officials. But after Mr. Trump toppled the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, his view changed.
On the same day that the bars arrived at the White House, the Trump administration issued a new policy allowing traders to import Venezuelan gold from one of the world’s most violent and corrupt mining regions. The first supplies would come from a state-owned mining company that remained a designated U.S. national security threat.
“Usually, you have to be in the Olympics to bring back the gold,” Mr. Burgum later saidat an energy conference, regaling listeners with the tale of how he had opened Venezuela’s gold pipeline.
The gold trading deal exemplified how Mr. Trump used the capture of Mr. Maduro to gain control of Venezuela’s resources. First, he took charge of Venezuela’s oil exports. Next, his administration turned to Venezuela’s mineral wealth.
That included one of the world’s largest untapped gold reserves at a time when the prices were near record highs and buyers were hungry for it.
The Trump administration and its business allies said that gold sales would benefit the U.S. economy; help develop Venezuela’s mining region; and deprive criminals and corrupt officials of income.
But a New York Times investigation, from the mines of southern Venezuela to the White House to the trading houses of Europe, found that Mr. Trump aligned America with an industry that is still plagued by the very criminality that he said he was fighting by arresting Mr. Maduro.
Planes carried gold out of Venezuela before companies had even visited the mines. Some of that gold, The Times found, is linked to miners who pay gang protection money. That allows criminals to profit from the administration’s signature deal.
And American financiers are investing in a mine tied to gangsters as part of a deal brokered by the Trump administration.
Venezuelan gold had once benefited American adversaries like Iran. Mr. Trump sought to redirect it to the United States to be refined.
But partly as a consequence of the administration’s hasty approach, all that gold — hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth — sits untouched in warehouses, according to three people with knowledge of the shipments. Refiners would need to guarantee, under international rules, that the gold has not funded gangs, environmental destruction or corruption.
“Do we want to be the first refiner to publicly announce that we are receiving Venezuelan gold?” Simon Houghton-Dodd of Asahi Refining mused at a recent industry gathering in London.
This account of Mr. Trump’s gold rush is based on interviews with miners and refiners in El Callao, the heart of Venezuelan mining, as well as on interviews with White House and Venezuelan government officials, industry leaders and global commodities brokers.
Some spoke on the condition of anonymity, either because they were not authorized to speak publicly or because doing so would jeopardize their livelihoods or safety.
The gold arrangement is a crystallization of Mr. Trump’s long-held views on Venezuela, natural resources and U.S. power. Mr. Maduro was a dictator who oversaw a corrupt and violent system, but Mr. Trump has repeatedly cut deals with such leaders.
What set Mr. Maduro apart, besides his refusal to yield to Mr. Trump’s demand that he leave office, was that he controlled a nation rich with resources and traded them with America’s adversaries. Mr. Trump, particularly in his second term, has declared that the U.S. must have access to key minerals worldwide and expand its influence in the Western Hemisphere.
In January, Mr. Trump sent U.S. commandos to remove Mr. Maduro from power. He then moved to bring Venezuela’s riches under American control. It was a gamble that investment would bring reform, and not the other way around.
The White House said that progress takes time. “For years, Venezuela’s mining and gold industry has been stolen from the Venezuelan people and has been used to prop up dangerous gangs and support bad actors around the globe,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, wrote in a statement. “The United States is helping solve this longstanding problem. We are cleaning up Venezuela’s mining industry. Western companies are improving and legitimizing it.”
To carry out that vision, the Trump administration turned to business leaders eager to profit from the president’s mercantilist worldview.
Among them was Richard Holtum, the chief executive of Trafigura, one of the world’s largest trading houses. Mr. Holtum joined Mr. Trump at the White House to commemorate that first shipment of Venezuelan gold.
He had good reason to celebrate.
It was his company that had persuaded the White House to move on Venezuelan gold in the first place.
Striking Gold
Within days of Mr. Maduro’s arrest, Trafigura executives contacted the White House with a bold idea.
The Trump administration had just granted Trafigura the right to sell Venezuelan oil, giving it, according to the company, a broad confidential permit to bypass sanctions. But with skyrocketing gold prices, executives had ambitions beyond oil.
Trafigura executives told the White House that Venezuelan gold was a national security issue, according to people familiar with the proposal. They argued that the White House had an opportunity to wrest control of a lawless industry and put Venezuela’s minerals in the hands of the U.S. government and its partners — namely Trafigura.
At least some Trafigura employees were wary, according to people involved in discussions at the time. Venezuela had lots of gold, but how much could be traced and documented to industry standards? Getting involved in a country where gold is associated with human rights abuse, terrorism financing and corruption was risky.
White House officials knew these risks and the difficulty of cleaning up the industry. But officials said they felt pressure from Mr. Trump to make deals, and fast. Some argued that immediate investment was likelier to bring change than continued isolation.
Mr. Trump had been eyeing Venezuelan gold since returning to office in January 2025. He made the country a foreign policy priority and assigned a trusted emissary, Richard Grenell, to negotiate for U.S. access to resources, including gold. Mr. Grenell reached a tentative deal, but it collapsed over disagreements about Mr. Maduro’s leaving office.
Mr. Trump chose the military option instead.
Against that backdrop, officials said, Trafigura’s pitch was exactly what the White House wanted to hear. “Trafigura had a viable and quick plan to legitimately market gold following years of corrupt Venezuelan practices,” the White House said in a separate statement.
The new Venezuelan government was less enthusiastic.
Concerns in Venezuela
In early March, Mr. Burgum, the interior secretary, flew to the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. Mr. Trump appeared giddy with the success of his intervention, and Mr. Burgum, who oversees American mining, wanted to leave his mark on the project, according to two people familiar with the negotiations.
Mr. Burgum made it clear to Venezuelan officials that he wanted to broker big deals, the people said. The Trafigura proposal, which had taken a back seat to oil deals, was now a priority.
Delcy Rodríguez, the country’s interim president, was skeptical, according to people close to her. Under the proposal, Venezuela’s gold revenue would flow into an account controlled by the U.S. Treasury, which would then dole it out.
Despite her title, she had only nominal command over the military generals who exercised control in the mining region. If something went wrong, Ms. Rodríguez did not want to be held responsible.
But she was in no position to negotiate. Ever since Mr. Trump installed her as Mr. Maduro’s replacement, Ms. Rodríguez depended on Washington’s good will to stay in office.
Days before Mr. Burgum’s arrival, she agreed to let Trafigura partner with Venezuela’s state-owned gold producer, Minerven. The deal gave Trafigura a yearlong right to buy and export gold from the handful of underground, industrial mines in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan mining ministry, which signed the gold deals, and the government’s media office did not respond to requests for comment.
On March 5, Mr. Burgum officiated the contract signing. Within hours, Trafigura whisked the first gold to the United States on a chartered plane.
“At the end of the two days, we were able to bring home $100 million of gold — physically, the gold,” Mr. Burgum later recounted to energy investors.
Trafigura was first into the market, which was reason to celebrate in the West Wing.
Trafigura’s partnership with Minerven, though, was hardly straightforward. Minerven’s facilities are surrounded by gang territory, where workers and suppliers pay protection money. Criminal ties to the region’s gold industry are well documented.
Trump administration officials made clear that the president wanted things to move quickly. “What the president likes is action,” Jarrod Agen, the top White House energy adviser, said in Caracas in April. “He also likes deals, and he likes progress.”
Trafigura and Minerven came up with a solution that seemingly carved out their operation from the criminality. Trafigura would buy gold only from two industrial mines that are fenced off and guarded by the military. The gold would be mined and processed on site, keeping gangsters and corrupt officials at bay.
Trafigura would then ship the semi-pure gold to the United States to be refined and sold onward.
It has not worked out so cleanly.
Protection Payments to Gangsters
The export pipeline was up and running within weeks. It has since developed into regular purchases that can be as large as 400 kilograms a month (about 880 pounds, or roughly the weight of a concert grand piano), according to a Venezuelan official and another person familiar with the arrangement.
The Trump administration left it to others to certify that the gold met industry standards, which included being free from illegal activity. But the gold started flowing before Trafigura or independent auditors had even visited the mines.
The company hired an auditor last spring and a risk consultant over the summer, after it had already bought millions of dollars worth of gold that had not been certified. “Due diligence of our supply chain is ongoing, and we are continuing to implement our joint responsible sourcing program with Minerven,” Trafigura said.
A Times reporter visited Venezuela’s gold production hub, the town of El Callao, this summer. Along with Minerven’s underground mines, it is home to hundreds of crude, privately run mining operations, including cooperatives known as brigades. The operators of those mines dig for gold and give a portion of it to the local gang, Tren de Guayana, as protection money, according to interviews with about a dozen mine owners, brigade leaders and Minerven employees.
Some brigades operate inside the fence, on Minerven property. The leader of one brigade told The Times that, each month, 20 percent of the team’s gold goes to the gang, a practice that is so ingrained in the local economy that it is known as “el sistema” — the system.
Another portion of what they collect, the brigade leader said, goes to Minerven, which melts it down along with the gold being sold to Trafigura. That account is supported by interviews with other brigade members in the area as well as Minerven employees.
That means that, in the Trump administration’s signature Venezuelan gold venture, the United States is importing bars that contain at least some amount of gold linked to Tren de Guayana.
David Soud, an investigator specializing in tracing illicit gold, whom Trafigura hired as a consultant this summer, acknowledged that operating in Venezuela remains risky.
“What I can say is that exploitation is deeply entrenched in the Venezuelan gold ecosystem,” he said. “And it is extremely challenging to work to build a supply chain that is free of it.”
Dozens of Venezuelan military officers still hold managerial posts at Minerven, despite Mr. Trump’s earlier concerns that Venezuela’s armed forces oversaw gold-related corruption.
Multiple Minerven workers said in interviews that they have been frequently threatened by the military and intelligence officers working for the company with dismissal or terrorism-related charges for demanding the benefits stated in their contracts.
Payrolls seen by The Times show that Minerven declares only a fraction of the gold that it sells to Trafigura. Workers say the underreporting reduces their wages, which are based primarily on production.
Trafigura pointed to the auditor’s visit to the mines. “To date, no human rights violations, conflict-financing, illegal taxation, extortion, or involvement of illegal actors have been identified at the sites,” Trafigura said.
Once Mr. Trump opened the door for Trafigura, other firms sought to cash in.
Even Riskier Territory
In late April, the White House organized a business delegation to Caracas, one of a growing number of opportunities for U.S. executives to negotiate deals.
One of those executives was Sean Pi, a private equity fund partner whose company, Heeney Capital, invests in mines. He had testified before Congress in support of legislation to fast-track mining projects in line with Mr. Trump’s broader goals on minerals.
Mr. Pi joined business leaders in Caracas to mingle with Ms. Rodríguez. He soon solidified a gold deal for his company.
Heeney Capital partnered with a rival of Trafigura, Mercuria, to produce and export Venezuelan gold. The pair estimated that their agreements would one day generate about $2.2 billion in annual mineral exports.
Because Trafigura had already locked in supplies from Venezuela’s established, below-ground mines, Heeney would need to look to more informal sites — which carry greater risks of corruption and environmental damage.
Heeney set its sights on El Chocó, a large open-pit mine run by the Venezuelan state.
The mine’s contractors, which provide machinery, catering and other services, paid protection money to Tren de Guayana, two workers employed by the mine’s contractors said in July.
In some ways, though, El Chocó represents a victory for the Trump administration. The Venezuelan government had been working with an Iranian company, Espadana, to build a processing plant at the mine. After Mr. Maduro’s downfall, the United States prohibited Venezuela from working with Iran. Most Espadana workers packed up and left.
On a recent visit, mining in El Chocó continued, but construction on the plant had stopped. The Iranian company’s machinery sat idle. Military counterintelligence squads and armored personnel carriers guarded the perimeter.
Despite those changes, anyone getting gold from El Chocó would risk buying into a system tied to organized crime.
“Around 90 percent of the gold produced in Venezuela is criminally produced,” said Julia Yansura, program director at the FACT Coalition, a Washington-based anticorruption organization. “If international companies want to go in and try to find the 10 percent that’s supposedly OK, that’s like searching for a needle in a haystack.”
Heeney and its founders did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesman for Mercuria declined to comment.
This month, Heeney announced it had signed a deal to take over mining operations and export rights at El Chocó. The company said it would modernize operations to international standards. It is unclear what steps Heeney might take to disentangle the mine from organized crime.
At the White House, Unshaken Confidence
Half a year after Trafigura began bringing Venezuelan gold into the United States, the company has been unable to resell it, according to people familiar with the deal.
That means that gold, meant to be a boon to U.S. business, instead sits in storage. Whoever buys and refines it would need to vouch that the gold has no ties to criminality.
The Trump administration is undeterred. It has continued loosening economic sanctions on Venezuelan mining. Democratic lawmakers, though, have questioned the legality of the Trafigura deal and promise greater oversight if they win control of Congress in November.
Some in the industry argue that the risks of dealing with Venezuela’s gold are no excuse to give up.
“The point is to engage and try to find a way to create a supply chain with integrity,” said Mr. Soud, the consultant to Trafigura. “The main risk of getting involved in any way with Venezuelan gold is: How on earth do you keep the gold you are bringing out of Venezuela from being tainted?”
Mariana Martínez contributed reporting from Caracas, and Justin Scheck contributed from London.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Sunday, September 27, 2026
Trump’s War With Iran Drags Down Republicans in Midterm Elections - The New York Times
Some Republicans Issue a New Call on Trump’s War With Iran: End It Now
"As their midterm picture darkens, and gas and diesel prices soar, some Republicans who backed the war for months are now changing their tune.
As President Trump warned in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in recent days that he might “annihilate” Iran, a growing number of Republicans were scrambling to find distance from a costly war that has swelled into a midterm crisis for the party.
The split screen showed how Mr. Trump and his party’s battleground candidates are increasingly at odds as the November elections approach. With no clear resolution in sight, the war has sent the prices of gasoline, diesel and heating oil upward, and cost increases have spilled across the economy. Mortgage rates have also climbed to seven percent, squeezing prospective homeowners already struggling with inflation.
While Mr. Trump is talking about escalating the war if he cannot strike a deal with Iran, Republicans in competitive races are losing patience with the fighting.
Representative Ashley Hinson, the party’s Senate nominee in Iowa, called at a news conference Friday for an “immediate” end to the war, saying she was “incredibly frustrated” by rising costs. Former Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee in the Senate race in Michigan and an early cheerleader for the war, released an advertisement on Monday in which he declared that it “needs to end.”
Brinker Harding, a Republican trying to win a swing Nebraska congressional district that has been in his party’s hands for nearly a decade, said in an interview Friday that “we need to bring the war in Iran to a close as quickly as possible.” And Senator Jon Husted, who is working to fend off the Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, told reporters on Friday that “we got to bring the war to a close” — even as he added that any resolution should be on “acceptable” terms.
Still, many Republicans have been cautious about crossing Mr. Trump, fearing a backlash that could alienate Republican voters they need in November. Despite Ms. Hinson’s and Mr. Husted’s calls for an end to the war, they recently voted against resolutions to rein in Mr. Trump’s ability to carry on the conflict.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump said he rejected Iran’s latest cease-fire proposal, another signal that Republicans’ calls for an end to the war would not be swiftly answered. The proposal would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz — a vital oil-shipping corridor before the war — and restarted negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.
Much of the conflict has played out as Mr. Trump conducted a primary season retribution campaign against Republicans he deemed disloyal.
“A lot of Republicans didn’t want to have a fight with him during the primaries,” said Carter Wrenn, a Republican strategist in North Carolina, referring to Mr. Trump. “But now that they’re over, it looks to me like some of them are now starting to separate.”
For Republicans in key races, Mr. Wrenn added, the war is a “big problem.”
Nationwide, the cost of a gallon of gasoline has climbed by 40 cents this month to roughly $4.50, according to the AAA motor club, with the Strait of Hormuz now stuck in a lethal monthslong stalemate. Mortgage rates are high and rising, and the cost of a gallon of diesel has climbed to about $6.50, threatening to further lift grocery prices by increasing transportation costs. The Trump administration is rushing to tamp down surging yields on some government bonds.
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Republicans have worried about the conflict for months, as the president’s early promise of a military campaign lasting “four to five weeks” faded to months of on-and-off fighting and deepening public frustration.
Mr. Trump says his chief objective is to block Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. “I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election because it doesn’t make sense for them not to,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday in his speech to the U.N. “They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election.”
And he has maintained that the coming election is not a factor in his decision-making on the war, going so far as to claim at times that he does not care about the midterms and does not think about Americans’ financial situations. “I gave absolutely no credence and will not give credence to the election when it comes to Iran,” Mr. Trump told the U.N. “It doesn’t even enter my mind.”
Not every battleground Republican has called for the war’s end, or offered even glancing criticism. In North Carolina, for example, the Republican nominee for Senate, Michael Whatley, has stood by the war. In Texas, the Republican Senate nominee, Ken Paxton, has avoided any daylight with Mr. Trump.
But Republicans have grown anxious that Mr. Whatley, a Trump ally, may face a narrowing path to victory. The party is also worried about Texas, a state where a Democrat has not won a Senate seat in decades.
“This war in Iran is a disaster,” James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, said at a news conference at a Dallas-area gas station on Saturday, warning that rising diesel costs would affect the price of a wide range of goods. “It must end.” (Mr. Paxton issued a statement saying, “Standing next to a gas pump doesn’t make Talarico the authority of affordability.”)
Some of the Republicans seen as having the best chances to defy a difficult political environment have been most vocally critical of the war.
Mr. Rogers’s reversal in Michigan was among the most striking. A longtime foreign-policy hawk and once a chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Rogers was an early supporter of the war. In May, Mr. Rogers told WDIV-TV that he viewed the war as a “win-win-win” for Americans.
But in his new ad, set at a supermarket, he acknowledged groceries cost “too much.” He also said that ending the war would swiftly bring down energy costs — a view that is generally not shared by economists.
In Iowa, a conservative-leaning state whose agricultural economy has been hit hard by rising fertilizer and diesel prices, Ms. Hinson was not alone in splitting with the president over the war. Two House Republicans in tough races, Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, voted this month to end the war or require explicit congressional authorization for it to move forward.
They were joined by five other Republicans, including two in competitive races: Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Tom Barrett of Michigan. Republicans still overwhelmingly voted to support the conflict, despite polling that suggests less than a third of likely voters in the midterms think Mr. Trump made the right decision in going to war. Ms. Hinson, a congresswoman, did not back the measure, but spoke out against the war in the days that followed.
A similar measure failed in the Senate last week, though Senator Susan Collins of Maine supported it. Ms. Collins, a centrist, has long opposed the war. She is seeking a sixth term in a Democratic-leaning state, and some polls show her in the lead or running roughly even with Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee.
Many Republicans are simply trying to avoid the issue, hoping to navigate past the economic headwinds by looking for other “positive things” they have done for constituents, said Matt Rexroad, a Republican strategist. But Mr. Rexroad expressed skepticism that either tiptoeing around the war or criticizing it forcefully would work.
“Republicans have a huge storm coming,” he said, “and it’s going to be pretty brutal for them all the way around.”
Emily Davies and Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting."
The Surprising Reasons China Is Skeptical of A.I. Safety Calls
The Surprising Reasons China Is Skeptical of A.I. Safety Calls
“In China, A.I. doomsday warnings can feel distinctly Western or like a ploy to stop Chinese A.I. companies from trying to overtake their U.S. rivals.
In Silicon Valley, the nightmare keeping computer scientists up is an artificial intelligence so advanced that humans cannot stop it from launching a global drone war or setting off a nuclear bomb.
In Beijing, the response could be simple: pull the plug, impose an internet blackout and haul in those responsible for the rogue A.I.
After major U.S. labs said that advanced models had escaped their testing guardrails and hacked into real-world systems, some tech executives and officials have warned that A.I. poses a catastrophic threat to humanity and called for Beijing and Washington to work together.
But for many in China, those doomsday warnings feel remote and distinctly Western. The idea that the ruling Communist Party could lose control over a technology is almost unfathomable. The authorities have successfully policed other potentially destabilizing technologies before, most notably the internet. During the pandemic, the government showed its ability to contain major crises by locking down entire cities and tracking hundreds of millions of residents.
“They can immediately cut off the grid of the entire city. They can go to different people to take away their phones. They have an intense amount of power in the physical world,” said Afra Wang, a Silicon Valley-based tech writer focusing on A.I. and technology in China.
“Given this amount of control over its people,” she said, how does one convince the party “that something like A.I. that lives on a computer is scary?”
In more cynical readings, the apocalyptic warnings sound like a ploy to stop Chinese A.I. companies from overtaking their U.S. rivals, with Chinese media reports suggesting that American A.I. companies are using “fear marketing” to maintain their market lead.
“In domestic industry circles, or among the people around me, most simply tune out,” said Jie Cai, who until recently was researching human-computer interaction technology and A.I. safety at Tsinghua University. To many in the industry, existential risk seems like a distant priority, he said.
“We still view A.I. as being in a very early stage,” he said. “The focus remains squarely on opportunity and innovation.”
For some, A.I. doomerism, with its idea of a looming apocalypse and reckoning for man, seems overtly Christian and especially foreign. One blogger compared Western A.I. fears to novels like Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and the motif that man is punished for trying to create life, the exclusive domain of God.
“This narrative tradition does not exist in Chinese culture,” the blogger concluded.
Liang Fang, head of A.I. safety and governance at Concordia, an A.I. safety consultancy based in Beijing, said that Chinese concepts of heaven or God could also account for how differently the technology was viewed.
He said that Chinese culture emphasized the “oneness of heaven and humanity” and the idea that man was an integral part of nature. “All things, including A.I., come from nature,” he said. “So technology is seen more as a companion in coexistence than an outside force destined to bring destruction.”
Even so, the release of Mythos, a powerful Anthropic frontier A.I. model, and others like it has been met in China with concern. Officials have issued new guidelines and warnings about A.I. agents going rogue, being exploited by hackers or used to make biological weapons.
Officials have drafted a cybercrime law that would require A.I. companies to monitor and stop their models from being used to create malicious code that could be used for cyberattacks.
The authorities also released an update this month of China’s “A.I. Safety Governance Framework,” a document that is a reliable indicator of future regulation. It echoed some of Silicon Valley’s fears about “recursive self-improvement,” or R.S.I., when A.I. systems are powerful enough to improve themselves with little or no help from human developers and could spin out of control.
Earlier this month, Wang Lihong, a senior official at the Cyberspace Administration of China, the internet regulator, said that A.I. powered cyberattacks had rendered traditional defense systems obsolete. “High vigilance is urgently needed regarding the risks of extreme A.I. loss of control,” she said.
Some Chinese researchers have for years been warning about the risks of A.I. advancing too quickly. In 2024, Pan Xudong and other researchers from Fudan University in Shanghai found that two popular large language models by Meta and Alibaba had shown the ability to replicate themselves, which is seen as a step toward A.I. being able to outsmart human beings..
Speaking about the paper at a conference on A.I. safety last year, Mr. Pan said he and his co-authors “wanted to convey that such an extreme A.I. risk is no longer confined to the realm of science fiction but is a real issue demanding discussion and scrutiny.”
But ultimately, in Beijing’s eyes, A.I. is like any other technology that with careful planning can be a powerful force harnessed for the good of the country. China already has some of the world’s strictest regulations on the industry. A.I. produced content must be labeled. A.I. models must be registered and approved by the authorities before being released.
While China has extensive regulation and testing requirements, there is no legal requirement to test for catastrophic risks like an A.I. system being used to make chemical or biological weapons.
Chinese A.I. companies are not as transparent as U.S. firms about their safety measures. Not all of them publish the results of safety evaluations before models are released. Those that do provide less detail and report less frequently than their U.S. peers, according to Concordia, which found that only five of China’s 10 leading A.I. companies reported the results of such evaluations between June 2025 and May 2026.
Sarah Sun, a Shanghai-based founder of the Open Community for AI Safety China, said the U.S. debate about A.I’s threats had helped inspire discussion in China.
But she noted that the Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s criticism of China had set off a backlash. In an open letter about the dangers of A.I., Mr. Amodei said that democracies needed to maintain their lead in the technology over authoritarian countries like China. He called for further restricting China’s access to advanced chips and other equipment needed to develop A.I.
“The fact that Dario has been so hawkish was really, really unhelpful in this scenario,” Ms. Sun said.
This kind of messaging, she said, makes the recent warnings about A.I. seem more like justification for holding China back than genuine concern about catastrophic risk. And that makes it harder for people like her to raise awareness about A.I. safety in China.
“There are people in China who are genuinely concerned about frontier A.I. risks,” she said, “and are interested in safety” and coordinating international responses.
Indeed, online commentators in China have referred to Anthropic as “A-chu,” a derogatory term that likens the A.I. giant to a beast. Yuyuan Tantian, a blog linked to China’s state broadcaster, said of American tech leaders like Mr. Amodei that “the only thing they want to slow is the pace at which others catch up.”
Zhou Hongyi, an influential Chinese cybersecurity executive, has said the solution is not to slow down but to accelerate one’s defensive capabilities with A.I. “Use A.I. to defeat A.I.,” he said in a video posted online last week. “If you use A.I. to attack, I will use A.I. to defend. If you deploy swarms of intelligent agents, I will counter with security agents.”
In an online post earlier this month, an engineer for the Chinese A.I. start-up DeepSeek said that allowing Anthropic to monopolize the world’s most advanced A.I. tools would be “no less serious” than Hitler having acquired the technology for the atomic bomb first in World War II.
Against this backdrop, it seemed even more unlikely that any agreement between the United States and China to discuss A.I. safety would lead to concrete changes, even if China’s leader, Xi Jinping, told President Trump in Washington that they should “manage A.I. for good.”
“If the U.S. says it’s slowing down, China won’t trust that,” said Zhao Minghao, deputy director of the Center for American Studies at Fudan University. “If China says it’s slowing down, the U.S. won’t trust that either.”
Pei-Lin Wu contributed reporting.
Lily Kuo is a China correspondent for The Times, based in Taipei.“
Saturday, September 26, 2026
White House Blocks CNN From Air Force One
White House Blocks CNN From Air Force One
“The White House blocked CNN from a Saturday trip to Tennessee after a court order restored access following a ban. The TV pool had boycotted coverage but resumed after CNN filmed an event with Xi Jinping.
CNN won’t be able to join President Trump on a Saturday trip to Tennessee. He had banned CNN and two other news outlets from the White House, but a court order on Thursday restored their access.
The White House on Friday night blocked CNN from accompanying President Trump on a Saturday trip to Tennessee, a network spokeswoman confirmed, in the latest twist in a weeklong standoff between Mr. Trump and the Washington press corps.
The decision immediately raised the question of whether the television pool would cover the president’s trip. The TV pool, a rotating group of networks that share the work of filming the president’s daily activities, had boycotted those responsibilities this week after Mr. Trump first banned CNN from participating in the pool.
In a Friday night email detailing logistics for the Saturday trip, the White House did not list a primary television pool representative. The White House did not return a request for comment.
In a post on Truth Social on Saturday morning, Mr. Trump continued to argue for banning the media from the White House. “Fake news should not be allowed in the White House!!! It has gone on far too long."
The tumult in White House coverage began a week ago, when Mr. Trump announced he would ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico in a social media post. Journalists for the outlets were denied access to White House grounds on Saturday. By Monday, the outlets had challenged the ban with a lawsuit in federal court.
Other news organizations made adjustments to their White House coverage in a show of solidarity with the banned news outlets. The TV pool suspended its work while CNN was banned from White House grounds, declining to film most of Mr. Trump’s visit this week with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.
On Thursday, a federal judge ordered the White House to restore the journalists’ credentials “immediately.” And on Friday, the White House let CNN film Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi during an event at the National Archives in Washington. When it did, the TV pool resumed its coverage.
The media outlets’ lawsuit requested that the White House restore the level of access that they had before Mr. Trump’s ban. The judge’s order directed the White House to reinstate the journalists’ hard passes to enter the White House complex but didn’t explicitly address their pool rotations.
In a Thursday interview with CNN, Theodore J. Boutrous, a lawyer for the media outlets, said he believed the order required the White House to restore their pool assignments“
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