US President Donald Trump dismissed warnings that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, after insiders at Frontier Institute’s Anthropic and OpenAI stepped up public warnings about the risks posed by the technology.
When asked if AI could lead to the extinction of humanity, President Trump replied, “No, I have no concerns.”
“I’m concerned that if we don’t beat AI, we’re going to be in a very bad position,” the president told reporters Thursday. “We’re currently leading China for a pretty good period of time. You could say it’s a year, but that’s a long period of time if you think about it.”
The United States and China are locked in a battle for AI supremacy, with tensions rising as China’s AI models become more sophisticated and deployed around the world.
President Trump’s comments came after a number of researchers at Frontier AI Institutes, including OpenAI and Anthropic, sounded the alarm about the rapid pace of technology development.
growing concern
Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced Tuesday that he is resigning from the company over concerns that Anthropic and rival Open AI are “putting our lives on the line.”
He added that those developing AI believe it “could wipe out humanity by the end of the decade.” This view was later echoed by other employees at the institute.
Many of the concerns about AI safety revolve around models that develop the ability to improve their own performance, a technique known as recursive self-improvement (RSI).
“I can’t overstate how dangerous speeding towards RSI is,” Jasmine Wang, an OpenAI researcher who works on integrity research, said Wednesday night.
Jakub Paciocki, chief scientist at OpenAI, said on Saturday that he has “strong hope” that the rate of progress in AI can be sustained into recursive self-improvement. “I worry that no one is ready for the impact of continued rapid improvements in machine intelligence.”
President Trump’s comments come as some Republicans join Democrats in supporting increased oversight of advanced AI systems.
In July, California Republican Rep. Jay Obanolte and Massachusetts Republican Rep. Lori Trahan announced plans to introduce legislation called the FRONTIER Act, which aims to establish a framework for governing the deployment of advanced AI models.
“Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are leaving labs, and companies are scrambling to move on anyway,” Trahan wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. “It is past time for Congress to stop sitting on the sidelines and do its job.”
Earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (R-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Cassar (D-Texas) introduced a bill called the Artificial Superintelligence Ban Act, which would pause advanced AI development until the federal government establishes safety rules.
