Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged policymakers to take AI leaders’ safety warnings seriously as competition between the United States and China intensifies. Speaking on Bloomberg Television’s Balance of Power on Tuesday, Blinken said governments may need stronger guardrails around advanced AI, which he described as capable of producing extraordinary benefits but catastrophic consequences if safeguards fail to keep pace. The Stanford 2026 AI Index said the performance gap between the leading U.S. and Chinese models narrowed to 2.7% as of March, with models from both countries repeatedly changing places near the top of rankings. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for frontier labs to slow capability gains until safety measures catch up, while proposing independent evaluators, shared standards and international coordination. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk have backed parts of that effort, although geopolitical competition may complicate coordination. President Donald Trump has rejected a slowdown, saying the United States only needs a strong and smart president as an AI safeguard and arguing that reduced U.S. development would help China. He also called fears that AI could destroy humanity a hoax. NIST (U.S. technology standards agency) continues to maintain its voluntary AI Risk Management Framework, which helps organizations identify and manage risks throughout the AI lifecycle; the agency says it is revising the framework under the White House AI Action Plan.