Trump downplays AI risks after dire expert warnings and calls to slow development down
The US President said "negative forces" were airing concerns about "things that won't happen".
Trump downplays AI risks after dire expert warnings and calls to slow development down
US President Donald Trump has played down the dangers posed by artificial intelligence after several days of stark warnings from experts.
“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,” Trump said during a visit to Ireland.
One of those warnings came from a former Anthropic researcher, who said “there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future” if development continued at its current pace.
On Saturday, leading industry executives agreed and urged a slowdown. Trump did not directly respond to that proposal, but said: “We’re leading China on AI... and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
Trump was speaking on the same day AI researcher Jacob Coxon - who left Anthropic a few days ago - told the BBC that staff building the systems were “genuinely frightened” for the future of humanity.
Coxon – who has also worked at OpenAI – supported the idea of slowing development, but said it would need to be coordinated with China.
Also on Saturday, Elon Musk, owner of xAI, and Sam Altman of OpenAI backed a warning from Anthropic chief Dario Amodei that development should be slowed “to reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong”.
The Anthropic CEO said any slowdown would need to be limited so as not to let China get ahead.
The questions around AI have sparked intense debate - and pose a dilemma for many world leaders.
On the one hand, the industry is viewed as a major opportunity to drive economic growth and to improve outdated digital systems and working methods.
But there have also been several incidents in which AI appears to have gone badly wrong.
In August, OpenAI said it had slowed training on some of its most advanced AI models to improve security.
The ChatGPT-maker said it was introducing new safeguards after its AI agents bypassed protections and hacked the tech start-up Hugging Face.
And in the same month, it was revealed that two of the world’s most powerful AI tools created fake human profiles in an attempt to trick people during attempted cyber-attacks.
The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) said that in the most serious case, Anthropic’s Mythos AI tried to gain access to a service by sending private messages after setting up fake accounts that mimicked real people - and then concealed the evidence.