President of United Stated (US) Donald Trump has dismissed warnings about the risks of Artificial Intelligence (AI), saying “very negative forces” are raising concerns about scenarios that will not happen, while stressing that the United States must remain the leader in the technology.
“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins,” Trump told reporters at his golf course in Ireland on Sunday when asked whether the AI industry should slow its development or face more regulation.
Trump said that the US could introduce “guardrails” for AI but argued that some of the concerns being raised about the technology were unnecessary.
“We could put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think 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 said.
Trump’s comments came as concerns over the development of increasingly capable AI systems have grown in the US, with some researchers and industry leaders warning about the risks posed by rapid advances in the technology.
Anthropic CEO [Chief Executive Officer] Dario Amodei on Saturday called on AI companies to slow the development of powerful models, saying more time was needed to understand and address the risks linked to their capabilities.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” Amodei wrote in a post on his personal website.
“AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious,” he stated.
Amodei said that stopping AI development altogether would deprive humanity of its benefits or leave the technology in the hands of authoritarian powers, while developing it too quickly would be reckless.
“We have sought a middle way,” he remarked, adding that he had become convinced in recent months that addressing the risks required greater caution.
Amodei’s remarks followed warnings from AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who left Anthropic after previously working at OpenAI. Coxon accused both companies of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.
“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon said on Tuesday.
Coxon, 27, said that people developing AI seriously believe the technology could kill humans by the end of the decade. He had spent the previous three years pretraining AI models, first at OpenAI and later at Anthropic.
Pretraining is the stage in which AI models absorb large amounts of data. Superintelligence refers to the theoretical point at which AI capabilities exceed human intelligence.
Amodei’s call for a slowdown has received support from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis. Altman had also that in late July that AI developers might need to voluntarily slow their progress to give society time to catch up.
More than 1,000 employees at leading AI companies, including Amodei, have also signed a petition calling on the US government to help “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”
The debate has intensified following reports from OpenAI and Anthropic about AI systems breaking out of confined environments, accessing the internet and attacking websites and platforms. The systems were reported to have demonstrated the ability to coordinate, establish hierarchies, cheat and erase traces of their actions.
