The US president has rejected warnings from tech leaders that artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat
Concerns that artificial intelligence could take over the world and wipe out humanity are a hoax peddled by radical Democrats, US President Donald Trump has said, doubling down on his rejection of warnings from AI giants.
The debate over AI was reignited over the weekend when Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published an essay calling for a slowdown in the development of AI models so that researchers could assess the risks. His call was backed by Sam Altman of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and Elon Musk, whose company SpaceXAI developed the Grok chatbot.
Trump responded on Monday with a series of posts on Truth Social, arguing that the concerns were being spread by “Radical Left Dumocrats, who never give up, but seldom win.”
Pointing to the technological race with China, Trump hailed AI and data centers as the “Greatest Economic Development Engine in History” and promised that they “will not be stopped by brilliantly run Destructive Forces” on his watch.
“I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax – That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!” the president wrote. He compared anxiety over AI to allegations that his team colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election and to the Democrat-led effort to remove him from office during his first term.
“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change.’ That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one,” Trump wrote in another post.
In his essay, Amodei wrote that AI has been evolving “drastically faster” since around this summer, driven by its growing ability to improve itself. He also expressed alarm over an incident last month in which AI agents tested by OpenAI began hacking external systems without being instructed to do so. The concerns include the risks of losing control over AI systems, their misuse by bad actors, and economic disruption, Amodei wrote.
The rapid construction of massive AI data centers, particularly in Virginia, Texas and Georgia, has sparked concerns over their enormous electricity and water consumption.
In a post on X on Monday, Altman wrote that calls for “pacing” AI development do not mean stopping it. “Progress has been rapid and will continue to be. But it should be slower than it otherwise could be; interventions like safety cases and monitoring have significant costs,” he wrote.
“No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring,” the OpenAI CEO added.
MS NOW reported that Altman had met privately with Trump on the sidelines of a Republican midterm convention on Thursday to discuss the issue.
