US President Donald Trump is one of the exceptions amid growing concerns about the rapid development of artificial intelligence. This Sunday, the president once again defended the need to maintain the pace, arguing that the United States needs to maintain its advantage over China, despite the fact that several of the major giants in the sector are asking to slow down.
“We are ahead of China in artificial intelligence, we are the most advanced country in the world and, frankly, I want to keep it that way,” he declared upon arrival at the Open golf tournament in Ireland. “Whoever wins artificial intelligence will be the winner.” The president also downplayed the increasingly frequent warnings coming from the industry itself about the risks of this technology. Trump attributed them to simple “negative forces.”
“I think there are many negative forces that are raising things that they should not be raising,” the president declared in an impromptu press conference. “And they are proposing things that are not going to happen.”
The Republican's words came after three of the main developers of artificial intelligence models - Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei; that of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and the founder of SpaceXAI, Elon Musk—will support putting a brake on the speed with which these systems advance due to the danger of “losing control” of these operations and that the technology could be misused for cyberattacks and bioterrorism.
Amodei was the first to throw itself into the ring, publishing an essay on its blog in which it proposed a braking plan that includes companies in the sector allowing full access to external verifiers. In his article he alluded to one of his great fears: that in less than a year, AI agents “could be able to take over the entire Internet.”
Altman and Musk gave him their support from social networks: “Dario is right,” wrote Musk, the richest man in the world. This Sunday, Demis Hassabis, chief scientist at Alphabet, Google's parent company, joined in, declaring that the path indicated by the CEO of Anthropic is “the right path.” So far, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is the great giant in the sector that has not spoken out.
The statements by the four leaders came, in turn, after an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, submitted his resignation this week, publicly warning that neither that company nor its competitors develop their artificial intelligence models responsibly. “Those building AI sincerely believe it could kill us all before the decade is out,” Coxon wrote on the social network X.
Trump's statements this Sunday are not the only ones in which he has downplayed the risks of AI. On Thursday, after Coxon's comments sparked a global uproar, the US president replied that he has "no" concern about the possibility that this technology could trigger human extinction. “What worries me is that, if we don't win the artificial intelligence race, we are going to be in a very bad position.” “Now we are ahead of China by quite a bit,” he insisted. Chinese President Xi Jinping is scheduled to travel to Washington for a meeting with Trump and a state dinner at the White House in ten days.
The difference between Trump's comments and those of industry leaders parallels that in the worlds of politics and technology regarding artificial intelligence. In the halls of Washington, AI models had barely been the subject of debate until now. Although, given the proximity of the November midterm elections and the impact on public opinion of the avalanche of warnings, this is likely to change.
On Thursday, former President Barack Obama urged Democratic lawmakers to devote much more attention in their campaigns to the issue of AI. “It is something that is moving very quickly in private hands, and if we do not impose ourselves, I think it can be dangerous,” he declared at a fundraising event, according to a partial transcript provided by his office to US media. “If we prevail, I think it could be beneficial.” If he were running for president in 2028, he added, AI would be “one of the central points” of his program. "I would have a very clear plan, and I would talk about it, and say, 'This is our safety plan, to make sure that children are not harmed.'"
For his part, Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu of California wrote in a message on “This mistake has harmed the United States, it has harmed the sector and it has harmed the American people,” the politician continued. “November is approaching.”
