President Donald Trump says he’s ready to break bread with Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei — but he’s not budging on his opposition to slowing the headlong rush of artificial intelligence development.
In remarks that also revisited a familiar theme of geopolitical competition, Mr Trump repeated his view that new regulations would give China an opening to overtake the United States in AI.
While he acknowledged Mr Amodei’s warning that moving too quickly on increasingly powerful systems could amplify risks, Mr Trump argued that the bigger priority is preserving America’s lead over Beijing.
“We’re about maybe a year and a half up on China,” Mr Trump told Fox News while at the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Illinois. “We’re leading, and we’re building tremendous, trillions of dollars’ worth of places. And why should we give that up?”
Trump says US will ‘straighten out’ any problems with AI
Mr Trump, confirming earlier reporting by Axios and Reuters, said on Fox News that he plans to have dinner with Mr Amodei. The sit-down comes as leaders of companies competing with Anthropic have publicly urged the industry to pump the brakes on development of ever more capable AI — including OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI.
Pressure for federal action has intensified after OpenAI said in July that an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company, fueling arguments that stronger oversight is needed as systems grow more independent.
Mr Trump brushed off fears about rogue AI agents, telling Fox News the incidents were not a reason for alarm. “I don’t worry about it,” he said, while also voicing confidence in the technology and what it could deliver.
Mr Amodei is far from the only heavyweight in tech seeking to influence Mr Trump’s thinking on AI rules. In an interview aired earlier Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said he would like to meet the president to talk about the issue.
Dario Amodei is not the only major tech figure trying to bend Mr Trump’s ear on AI regulation
“I hope that, given my life’s work in the field, my saying how unique and different this is and how concerned I am will add to what he’s hearing from other people,” Mr Gates said, aligning himself with Mr Amodei and others calling for new AI regulations.
“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” Mr Gates said in the taped interview. “And that has to be a required thing.”
Concerns over AI’s dangers have circulated for years, but took on fresh intensity this month after researchers at leading AI labs put both a timeline and a probability on their warnings.
Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher, warned that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade, a claim that helped spur US politicians to renew calls for rules governing the technology.
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Asked about such warnings in the NBC interview — excerpts of which where released earlier on Friday — Mr Gates said “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that can cause a billion deaths.”
Mr Trump has previously dismissed the swell of AI alarm as a “hoax.” Mr Gates countered that safeguards would not dramatically slow progress, and said the dangers of doing nothing were mare real.
“It’s not a hoax at all,” Mr Gates told NBC.
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, also reinforced Mr Coxon’s warning, saying there was a more than 10% chance of such an event within the next decade.
