President Donald Trump on Sunday played down the need for his administration to check artificial intelligence development, citing concern that the United States could lose its advantage over China. He acknowledged that some regulation may be needed but provided no details, one day after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged the industry to slow development so safety measures could catch up.
Speaking to reporters during a weekend trip to Ireland, Trump attributed warnings that AI is advancing too quickly and with too little oversight to unidentified “negative forces.” Industry pioneers have raised such concerns, and other technology leaders, including Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, publicly agreed with Amodei’s call for a slowdown.
“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 said. “But whoever wins with AI wins.”
Asked later Sunday whether he was minimizing AI risks, Trump said, “I’m not downplaying,” and added that the technology is “going to be more good than bad, but by a lot.” During the flight back to Washington, he again emphasized the stakes of being the country that “wins AI.”
Trump also said, after watching a golfer tee off in the Irish Open at his resort in Doonbeg, that the United States leads China in AI development and that he wanted to preserve that position. Chinese President Xi Jinping is due at the White House later in September for a meeting with Trump, and AI is likely to be among the subjects they discuss.