WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’s opposition to guardrails on artificial intelligence (AI) puts him at odds with a growing number of lawmakers from both parties, with AI safety fears adding to voters’ misgivings about the technology heading into the midterm elections.
In a rapid-fire series of social media posts, Trump on Monday belittled a push led by Anthropic PBC and OpenAI to slow work on cutting-edge systems, invoking bombastic language to dismiss existential fears about AI as “a hoax”.
Later in the day, he made an impromptu call to Nvidia Corp chief executive officer (CEO) Jensen Huang, who was onstage at a technology conference and put their conversation on speakerphone.
“The robots will not be taking over. AI will not be taking over the rest of the world,” Trump told Huang, who was a featured guest at the “All-In” summit in Los Angeles.
“We have to do things, and we have to do them prudently, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop an industry.”
Taken together, Trump’s remarks represented his most vigorous defence against attempts to pace the development of a technology that’s central to his economic agenda and behind a historic US stock market rally.
Any pause or delay in progress on so-called frontier AI systems would be unwelcome among investors who are betting that the AI boom will drive hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditure.
Highlighting the stakes for Trump, who views the stock market as a benchmark of his success as president, shares of chipmakers that have benefited from a surge in AI infrastructure spending slid on Monday, with Nvidia falling 3.4% and Micron Technology Inc declining 5.3%.
David Sacks, a venture capitalist who served as Trump’s AI czar and is now co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology, expressed similar ideas in a Bloomberg Television interview Monday.
Anthropic and OpenAI are free to slow development of their most sophisticated models on their own if they believe the technology poses serious risks, he said, arguing they don’t need new regulation to do it.
“I don’t really believe this claim that they can’t make their products safe unless the government steps in and imposes requirements on companies that aren’t even at the frontier,” Sacks said.
Trump’s pushback was prompted by a 3,800-word essay posted last Saturday from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who urged restraining development of the most advanced systems so researchers can better understand potential threats.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk – whose companies are bitter rivals to Anthropic – quickly endorsed Amodei’s missive, adding to a groundswell across Silicon Valley supporting steps to address AI’s unpredictable risks.
In Washington, the president increasingly stands alone with his rejection of tighter oversight, as lawmakers float a range of measures aimed at addressing AI safety concerns.
A bipartisan group of senators including Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz and Democratic Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar are working on legislation requiring top AI developers to prevent catastrophic risks.
Other proposals include a measure from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who aligns with Democrats, calling for a ban on the so-called superintelligent AI that had stirred Amodei’s latest warnings.
Lawmakers have also floated the idea of a kill switch for AI as part of a separate bill.
Yet Congress is unlikely to act on any AI legislation anytime soon, with the House slated to leave Washington tomorrow and not return until after the November elections. The brief lame duck session after the election is expected to focus on a plan to boost the Pentagon budget.
“Given what we know about technology, we can’t stuff AI back in a box. But we can collectively determine how it’s developed and how it’s used, rather than sitting back and letting AI and its fallout happen to us,” former President Barack Obama said.
Obama, a Democrat who now only rarely wades in on public policy debates, said he was neither an AI accelerationist nor a doomer predicting humanity’s destruction.
“But at the end of the day, voluntary standards made by a handful of tech companies won’t be enough,” he said, instead urging lawmakers in Washington to “get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns, anticipate AI’s impact on jobs and our kids, and make sure that AI’s benefits are widely spread”.
Risking Trump’s wrath, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson cautiously signalled his openness to regulation, saying on Monday that lawmakers “potentially” will need to impose guardrails on the industry, though he cautioned it would likely take “some time” to fashion legislation with broad enough support to pass.
“This is a very complex issue that requires a lot of work and a bipartisan solution,” Johnson told reporters.
Anxiety about AI’s existential risks burst into the mainstream last week, driven by the departure of Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who accused AI companies of “gambling with our lives” in a resignation post he shared on social media.
Dozens of other AI researchers showed support for Coxon’s post, which called for slowing a technology that he said “could kill us all by the end of the decade”.
Those safety concerns threaten to compound bipartisan resentment of AI ahead of the November election, where the technology is emerging as a core issue in congressional and local races.
Voters have grown increasingly frustrated by the impact of the AI buildout, particularly the rapid proliferation of data centres blamed for driving up utility prices. — Bloomberg
