US President Donald Trump has downplayed risks posed by artificial intelligence following days of dire warnings by experts.
“You have a lot of very 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 during a visit to Ireland.
One of the warnings came from a former Anthropic researcher who said “there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future” if the current pace of development continued.
On Saturday, top industry bosses agreed and called for a slow-down. Trump did not directly address the idea, but said: “We’re leading China on AI… and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
Trump spoke on the same day AI researcher Jacob Coxon – who quit Anthropic a few days ago – told the BBC staff who were developing the systems were “genuinely frightened” for the future of humanity.
Coxon – who has also worked at OpenAI – welcomed the idea of a slowdown but said it would need to be co-ordinated with China.
On Saturday, Elon Musk, owner of xAI, and Sam Altman of OpenAI, backed a warning from the head of Anthropic Dario Amodei that the pace of development should be slowed “to reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong”.
The Anthropic CEO said any slowdown would have to be limited to avoid allowing China to pull ahead.
The issues surrounding AI have prompted fierce debate – and present a dilemma for many world leaders.
On one hand, the sector is seen as huge opportunity to boost economic growth and a way to improve outdated digital systems and ways of working.
But there have also been a number of incidents where AI appears to have gone seriously wrong.
In August OpenAI said it had slowed down training some of its most advanced AI models to improve security.
The ChatGPT-maker said it was adding new measures after its AI agents bypassed safeguards and hacked the tech start-up Hugging Face.
And the same month it was disclosed two of the world’s most powerful AI tools created fake human profiles to try and trick people in attempted cyber-attacks.
The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) said in the most serious case, Anthropic’s Mythos AI tried to gain access to a service by sending private messages, having set up fake accounts mimicking real people – then hid the evidence.
