Trump Says He Has Criminal Power Over AI Companies: Should Investors Worry?

President Donald Trump says his administration already holds criminal and regulatory power over AI companies. He made the claim while arguing the industry needs no guardrail beyond himself.

He posted it minutes after Monday’s opening bell, into a market that was already selling AI stocks.

A Boast That Reads Like a Warning

The message ran on Truth Social and opened with a claim about presidential oversight.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! … We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” Trump said.

No new power was announced. Federal prosecutors can already charge a company, and regulators already hold authority over the sector.

What changed is that a president chose to brandish that leverage while defending the same firms. For investors, leverage over the firms holding up the AI trade points the wrong way.

Why the Claim Did Not Lift AI Stocks

The Nasdaq Composite fell 0.85% on Monday, while the S&P 500 dropped 0.57%.

Chipmakers took the worst of it. Marvell Technology fell 8%, Intel 7%, AMD 5%, and both Nvidia and Broadcom about 3%. AI cloud provider CoreWeave lost 7%.

In Tokyo, SoftBank Group, one of OpenAI’s largest outside backers, closed down more than 10%. BeInCrypto flagged how the AI slowdown rattled futures hours before the open.

The AI trade is priced on spending. Chipmakers, data center builders and cloud providers earn from the pace at which labs train ever larger models.

Trump’s post was meant to protect that spending. He signaled Washington will not impose a brake, which normally reads as a green light.

What happens when the people building frontier AI ask for limits, but the president says full speed ahead?Trump dismissed the latest calls for safety guardrails from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, framing the entire movement as a "SICK conspiracy" against domestic data centers.… pic.twitter.com/RoA1ktwOkr

— BeInCrypto (@beincrypto) September 14, 2026

It landed flat because the brake investors fear is voluntary and sits inside the labs. Congress set no federal requirement, as BeInCrypto reported when the safety burden shifted to developers.

A president can stop a bill. He cannot make Anthropic ship faster.

Meanwhile, oil complicates the picture. Brent jumped about 4% the same morning after Saudi Arabia shut its East-West pipeline, so not every red ticker is about AI.

The Fight With Anthropic

Dario Amodei, chief executive of AI developer Anthropic, published an essay on Saturday urging labs to slow work on their most capable models. Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed him.

“The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel'” Trump said in the post.

Beijing rejected the wider framing. Spokesperson Guo Jiakun said fearmongering and vicious competition serve no one’s interest.

BREAKING: China rejects calls from U.S. tech leaders to slow AI development, blasting the warnings as “fearmongering.”

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) September 14, 2026

Investor Michael Burry read the safety push differently, arguing it is really about squeezing out smaller rivals.

Trump meets Chinese leader Xi Jinping on September 24. Until then, investors decide whether a president claiming criminal power over AI firms is a floor under the trade or a ceiling on it.