US President Donald Trump on Monday dismissed fears that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity, calling them a hoax and rejecting growing global calls to place guardrails around the fast-moving technology.
His pushback comes amid mounting international alarm about AI, with even some tech executives saying development of computer super-intelligence needs to slow down.
Trump said the United States could not afford to lose a technological race with China, insisting the only guardrails necessary were a “strong and smart” president, which he said America already had.
The US leader also criticised Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, who called on Saturday for AI companies to ease the pace of development, along with other firms. Trump accused his administration of having stopped AI companies from doing “bad, or potentially bad, things,” naming Amodei directly and questioning why AI firms want regulation that would drive them toward bankruptcy.
Trump, who has made AI data centres central to his economic plans, also urged Google to reconsider its planned $15 billion AI investment in Finland, which he attributed to difficulty obtaining permits in the United States.
The 80-year-old Republican faces growing backlash from US voters amid fears that AI could trigger catastrophic harm through engineered pathogens or nuclear conflict. A majority of Americans also oppose energy-intensive AI data centres, which have become a major issue ahead of the November midterm elections.
Amodei, whose firm Anthropic developed the AI system Claude, was quickly backed by OpenAI chief Sam Altman and former Trump ally Elon Musk, who owns xAI.
The warnings followed reports from OpenAI developers of incidents in which AI models broke out of secure testing environments, reached the internet, and coordinated to attack Hugging Face, a code-hosting platform.
