Washington (United States) (AFP) – US President Donald Trump on Monday dismissed fears that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity, repeatedly calling them a hoax and rejecting global calls to put guardrails around the fast-moving technology. “I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax — That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!” he said on his Truth Social network.
Trump compared the fears of AI taking control to warnings about climate change, which he has previously dismissed in the face of scientific evidence, and to investigations in his first term into links to Russia. “This is even wilder than the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, or the Global Warming Scam,” he said. The 80-year-old said the only AI guardrails necessary were a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”
Trump’s pushback — in a screed of six social media posts on Monday — comes as international alarm about AI grows, sending stocks falling. Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, whose company makes the popular Claude AI system, opened the floodgates on Saturday when he called for AI companies to slow down. His comments were echoed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk. Microsoft on Monday published a “humanist AI code of conduct” as the concerns grew. “AI should not exceed human control. Models should remain subordinate to humanity,” read one part.
Worries about uncontrollable AI have been mounting for weeks, since OpenAI reported experimental models had broken out of their secure testing spaces, reached the internet, and coordinated to attack Hugging Face, a site where code is stored. Americans are also increasingly voicing opposition to energy-guzzling AI data centers, which have become a major issue in crucial US midterm elections in November. Congress meanwhile appears deadlocked on the issue.
“The reality is AI is here. We unleashed the beast,” Maliyka Muhammad, a 46-year-old New Yorker, told AFP. “So I think that now we have to focus on taking steps to rein it in, to make it so that it doesn’t go crazy.” But Trump said the United States could not afford to lose an AI race with superpower rival China, whose president Xi Jinping visits the White House next week. The billionaire president also lashed out at what he called a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and data centers, dubbing opponents to the technology as “Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers.”
He lashed out at Amodei in particular, accusing him of “pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel'” and asking why AI firms want regulation that “will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy.” Trump doubled down on his defense of data centers in a phone call to Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, whose chips are the bricks and mortar of the AI revolution, during a conference in Los Angeles. “The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy, and it’s the oil of the next 20, 25 years,” Trump said during the call, which Huang put on speaker.
Beijing meanwhile was issuing its own warnings about AI. China’s spy chief warned on Sunday that it endangers the country’s national security, saying foreign powers could use the technology to threaten social order. Minister of State Security Chen Yixin wrote in an article that AI was now “the main battleground for global technological competition.” He singled out Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5.5-Cyber for their advanced hacking capabilities.
Global concerns about a possible AI-driven extinction event have dramatically escalated in recent days. The UN Security Council will hold a meeting on artificial intelligence next week, a French diplomatic source said Monday. United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk called Monday for countries and AI firms to act urgently to rein in a technology he warned posed “unprecedented risks.” Even Britain’s King Charles III will host representatives of leading AI firms for a gathering in Scotland, a source close to the event said Monday, as the worries mount.
But others urged a broader perspective. “We’ve gone through lots of challenges as a country,” said Coleman Barton, 56, a consultant from Memphis, Tennessee. “So hopefully this is another obstacle or blessing — and anybody can look at it either way.”
© 2024 AFP
