Donald Trump has dismissed suggestions that artificial intelligence research needs to be slowed down – after a former employee at a top AI company said that the new tech could kill all humans by 2030.
Speaking on a trip to Ireland, the President said that: “You have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
He was responding to a reporter question around the testimony of Jacob Coxon, who said “there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future”.
After top AI CEOs agreed on the need for a slowdown, Trump dashed the suggestion of regulation.
He told journalists: “We’re leading China on AI… and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
Trump’s dampener came after Elon Musk and Sam Altman backed calls for tougher safeguards around artificial intelligence.
The high-profile CEOs followed Anthropic boss Dario Amodei’s warning that the technology is developing at a pace that could outstrip efforts to keep it under control.
The Anthropic boss set out a three-step framework designed to “pace” the development of frontier AI systems.
It includes giving independent evaluators permanent, employee-level access to leading AI companies’ systems; co-ordination between firms in democratic countries on shared safety standards; and international co-operation on the risks posed by increasingly capable AI.
Mr Amodei said Anthropic would immediately commit to the first measure, adding: “We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems.”
Musk, whose xAI company developed the Grok chatbot, responded to Mr Amodei’s post by writing: “Dario is right.”
The Tesla and SpaceX boss said separately that he had been “sounding the alarm on AI for a long time”.
He also suggested AI companies should peer-review one another’s models, though he did not explicitly commit xAI to Anthropic’s proposed independent-evaluation system.
By Chay Quinn
