Dublin, Sep 14: President Donald Trump on Sunday played down the need for his administration to check the development of artificial intelligence, saying he worried about ceding America’s edge over China in a global competition and that winning would help address the risks from the advancing technology.
While acknowledging the need for some regulation, Trump provided no specifics about potential rules and attributed warnings about the technology moving too quickly and with little oversight to “negative forces” he did not identify, though industry pioneers have raised such concerns.
“We can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that … shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” Trump told reporters during a weekend trip to Ireland. “But whoever wins with AI wins.”
The Republican president spoke a day after Dario Amodei, CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, said the industry should put the brakes on its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Other tech leaders, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, publicly agreed with Amodei.
Asked by a reporter if the industry should slow down or be regulated, Trump said after watching a golfer tee off in the Irish Open at his resort in Doonbeg that the United States is leading China in the development of AI and “frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping is due at the White House later in September to meet with Trump, and AI likely will be among the items they discuss.
AI has become a major election-year issue in the US as some of the country’s largest companies seed small towns with a national network of computing warehouses while Americans from both parties increasingly raise alarms about less farmland and water supplies and rising electricity bills. Trump has kept up his support for data centres even as both Republicans and Democrats run from them and many communities try to block them.
Former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, said his party should make AI a campaign issue.
“I would talk about this, and I would say, here’s our plan for safety, here’s our plan for making sure our kids are not corrupted by this. … I would be thinking about the economic impacts in very concrete ways and understanding what does it mean if there’s going to be job displacement. Where is that going to hit? How are we going to respond?” he said at an event last week with the top Democrat in the US House, New York Rep Hakeem Jeffries, according to a transcript released by his office.
White House meetings and a call for action by members of Congress
Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council at the White House, said he expects meetings will be held this week involving administration officials who oversee cyber and science and technology policy to discuss the next steps. Trump also could meet with members of Congress, some of whom have also been sounding alarms about the fast pace of AI development.
“I think the president wants to hear from them as well,” Hassett said.
US House Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged the need for “some guardrails, some safety measures” so AI “doesn’t run away.” But, like Trump, he also wants to ensure the US does not “lose our edge in the global competition on this with China because that would be a national security threat.”
Jeffries criticised Republican leaders for allowing members to go back to their districts for the final part of September.
“We should take decisive action now so that we can slow down, as the CEOs have recently acknowledged, … the pace of development in order to protect the American people and ensure that AI is proceeding safely,” Jeffries said.
Industry insider urges cooperation between Washington, Beijing
Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic employee who resigned over AI concerns and has gone public with his fears, argued for international rules along with industry self-regulation.
Coxon said he has grown concerned that AI models would soon gain super capabilities that could exceed human control.
“You’re building a human-level or superhuman-level mind, without understanding what it wants, or thinks, or the way it thinks,” Coxon said.
At a time of a fierce global competition for AI dominance, Coxon also urged cooperation between the US and China, the two countries who are leading the race, to slow down and address safety.
“I do hope that the people in China who are looking at the same problems as we are, so they’re trying to build the same technology, will come to the same conclusion that it has to be done in a measured manner, and it should be easy to cooperate on some sort of mutual — of mutual slowing,” Coxon said.
Otherwise, he said, “we risk running the same race with China, which could be equally dangerous.”
