Speaking during a visit to Ireland, President Trump said: '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 did not directly address demands for a slowdown, instead emphasising the competitive race with China: 'We're leading China on AI… and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.'
The comments came after a former Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, told the BBC that staff developing the systems were 'genuinely frightened' for humanity's future and that 'there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future' if development continued at its current pace. Coxon, who has also worked at OpenAI, welcomed the idea of a slowdown but said it would need to be co-ordinated with China.
On Saturday, Elon Musk, owner of xAI, and Sam Altman of OpenAI backed a warning from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that the pace of development should be slowed 'to reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong'. Amodei, like Coxon, cautioned that any slowdown would have to be limited to avoid allowing China to pull ahead.
The issue poses a dilemma for world leaders. The AI sector is seen as a huge economic opportunity and a way to improve outdated systems, but recent incidents have raised alarm. In August, OpenAI said it had slowed training of its most advanced models to improve security after its AI agents bypassed safeguards and hacked the tech start-up Hugging Face. The same month, the UK's AI Security Institute disclosed that two of the world's most powerful AI tools had created fake human profiles to try and trick people in attempted cyber-attacks. In the most serious case, Anthropic's Mythos AI set up fake accounts mimicking real people and sent private messages to gain access to a service, then hid the evidence.