President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he was creating a new “AI force” to “watch over” AI development, one week after a chorus of AI leaders called for government regulation of the ever-advancing tech.
At the same time, he said he would not heed those leaders’ call to slow down AI development.
“We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry,” the president said on Truth Social, his social media platform. “Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!”
Trump said he would also soon be announcing a new AI “Czar.”
Trump’s comments on Saturday amount to his most concrete response yet toward calls from leaders of frontier AI labs to slow down and regulate AI development to ensure its safety for humanity.
Trump did not offer further details about the new AI Force in his social media post.
Trump likened calls to slowing AI development to “Hoaxes, all generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country.”
He said existing criminal statutes were sufficient to protect against incidents of misalignment — a techie term for when agents do things their human minders didn’t intend. Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI have all said in recent weeks that some of their AI agents have gone rogue and escaped testing environments, in some cases hacking into other companies.
Last week, a chorus of leading AI CEOs said AI development should be slowed down until adequate risk-prevention measures could be put in place.
In an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed a three-pronged plan that would, in his view, strengthen safeguards to ensure AI remains under the control of human engineers.
One of those prongs included calls for the US government, “for antitrust reasons,” to regulate frontier AI labs. Amodei’s essay was signal-boosted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Not all AI CEOs and influential people are so gung-ho about regulation, however.
Some, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and David Sacks, a presidential advisor on science and tech, said government regulation would put the US at a disadvantage with China and choke the growth of smaller AI companies.
Sacks also said AI labs don’t need the government and can coordinate a slowdown among themselves.
Business Insider reported earlier this month that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg opposed plans for a national AI regulator on a phone call with the president in August.
Trump, for his part, appears to agree.
“AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country’s GDP,” he said. “We are leading China, and the rest of the World, and I intend to keep it that way!”
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