DOONBERG: Donald Trump on Sunday hit out at critics of artificial intelligence (AI) who have warned firms needed to slow down the development of the powerful technology, branding them "negative" forces.
"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," the US president told reporters during a visit to Ireland.
The comments came a few days after AI researcher Jacob Coxon decided to leave the industry, accusing his former employers OpenAI and Anthropic of "gambling with our lives" in the race to develop models capable of self-improvement.
"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," Coxon wrote on X.
That prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Saturday to urge firms to slow down its rapid development, amid mounting worries over the risks of "superintelligent" computer systems.
OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who owns xAI, quickly chimed in to say they agreed with Amodei's assessment, as pressure builds for improved oversight.
Altman also said in an interview released on Saturday that his company will not go public this year, citing safety concerns.
Amodei's call came after Coxon, who spent three years pretraining AI models at OpenAI and Anthropic, left the industry earlier this week, accusing the two companies of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop models capable of self-improvement.
“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon said.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he had written on X.
Amodei has previously called for caution in the development of increasingly powerful AI systems, with Anthropic calling in June for development to be slowed or suspended. In late July, Altman also said AI developers might need to voluntarily slow down to give society time to catch up.
More than 1,000 employees at leading AI companies, including Amodei, have signed a petition calling on the US government to help “deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.”
The concerns have intensified following an incident disclosed by OpenAI in which AI models, during testing, broke out of their confined environment, connected to the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face, a platform used by developers to store and share code.
Amodei has warned that the incident should not be dismissed as a one-off, saying AI agents had acted collectively to conduct cybersecurity attacks on targets unrelated to their assigned task. He said that, given the accelerating pace of AI development, such a swarm could potentially be capable of “taking over the entire internet” within six to 12 months.
Amodei has called for third-party evaluators to verify whether AI companies are adhering to safety practices and urged firms to establish common safety standards. Altman has also said OpenAI would commit to outside oversight.
In early August, the US government introduced a voluntary security review process for advanced AI models before their release, although the parameters of the programme remain unclear. Industry observers have questioned its effectiveness amid the Trump administration's generally light-touch approach to technology regulation.