Donald Trump has played down warnings about the risks of artificial intelligence, dismissing concerns as claims from “negative forces” while industry leaders call for the pace of development to be controlled.
Speaking to reporters during a trip to Ireland, the US president said he was not worried about the technology and insisted that the United States was ahead of China in AI development.
“Frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins,” Mr Trump said.
His comments came after Dario Amodei, chief executive of AI company Anthropic, warned that the technology was advancing at a dangerous speed. Mr Amodei said AI could potentially lead a swarm capable of taking over the entire internet within six to 12 months.
“Negative forces” were, Mr Trump said, “bringing up things that won’t happen”.
Mr Amodei has proposed a three-part plan to ensure AI is developed at what he described as a balanced rate. In an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier, he called for AI firms to give independent third-party evaluators access to their systems so they could assess safety measures and report incidents.
“Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now,” he wrote, adding that the remaining proposals would require co-ordination between companies and governments, including authoritarian states.
He said companies could and should work voluntarily to establish industry standards as AI development accelerated.
The proposals have received support from Elon Musk, who leads Grok, and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. Responding to Mr Amodei on X, Mr Musk wrote: “Dario is right.”
Mr Altman said: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.”
He also backed independent assessments, saying: “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”
The debate follows OpenAI’s disclosure in July that one of its AI systems had independently hacked Hugging Face, a platform used by AI developers, in what the company described as an “unprecedented cyber incident”.
Anthropic has previously said it blocked attempts by bad actors to use its models for malicious purposes, including cyber attacks, surveillance and research that could have resulted in biological weapons.
