DUBLIN — President Donald Trump on Sunday appeared to dismiss calls from top artificial intelligence leaders to slow down development of AI models, saying that the United States needed to maintain its competitive edge over China.
“We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way,” he said on the sidelines of the Irish Open golf tournament. “Whoever wins AI wins.”
On Saturday, three of the AI industry’s most prominent leaders — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk — endorsed slowing the pace at which the industry improves AI model capabilities. Their united front followed the resignation of an Anthropic researcher who on Tuesday warned that the firm and its competitors were not responsibly developing AI models. The researcher’s statement inflamed public debate about the risks of the technology.
Trump, without evidence, attributed the warnings to unspecified “negative forces.”
“I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” he told reporters. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
The remarks placed Trump once again firmly on the full-speed-ahead side of the debate over the pace of AI development, which has increasingly divided both the technology and political worlds. He’s become increasingly isolated in his position, as even members of his own party and some allies in the tech industry have grown uneasy with Trump’s apparent lack of concern over potential AI dangers.
Democrats have attacked his administration for doing too little to address the risks of artificial intelligence during his second term.
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) said the tech executives’ growing concerns about the safety of their products was a “direct result of the Trump administration letting the AI industry run wild.”
“That mistake has harmed America, harmed the industry and harmed the American people,” he wrote on X on Saturday. “November is coming.”
Meanwhile, David Sacks, the architect of the Trump administration’s hands-off approach to AI regulation, said that tech leaders should “go ahead” with pacing AI development. But he rejected the companies’ claims that the industry needed intervention from Washington to do that.
“But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission,” Sacks wrote on X.
He also said that the companies should stop saying their interest in slowing down “is purely altruistic.” The companies would be liable if their products caused a significant cyberattack, he said.
Amodei and other company officials have asked the U.S. government to waive antitrust laws so that they can coordinate on matters of AI safety, and Amodei wrote in his essay that it would be helpful if the government would “mediate or at least enable these discussions.”
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