US President Donald Trump has said calls for increased government oversight of artificial intelligence are unnecessary and part of a “conspiracy” aimed at allowing China to develop more technology than the United States.
“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and data centers, and only China is happy about it,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Monday.
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President Trump said his administration was already stopping AI companies from doing “bad things, or the potential to do bad things,” noting that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei “is currently pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel,’ but we will continue to do so,” and warned those he called “conspiracy theorists, traitors, traitors and leakers.”
“The only control or ‘guardrail’ that AI needs is a strong and smart (high IQ!) president. America definitely has that!” Trump wrote.
For the second day in a row, the U.S. president rejected calls to slow down AI amid growing concerns among lawmakers, technology experts and AI company executives that AI could quickly surpass human control.
“I think there’s a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that aren’t going to happen,” President Trump said Sunday, similarly dismissing concerns in the rapidly growing industry.
A dire warning from an AI executive
Some of this concern was sparked by Anthropic’s Amodei publishing a blog post on Saturday saying the AI industry needs to slow down its pace of capability growth to give it time to establish guardrails. Within six to 12 months, Amodei wrote, AI agents “could take over the entire Internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.”
He outlined a three-stage framework aimed at adjusting the pace of development and giving you more time to manage risk. The proposal was immediately supported by several other executives at major AI companies, including Elon Musk, who runs xAI, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Last week, U.S. lawmakers and industry experts were alarmed by former anthropology researcher Jacob Coxon, who said he resigned over concerns that technology being developed at the company could be beyond human control. “The people developing AI seriously believe that AI could wipe out humanity by the end of this decade,” Coxsone said in a widely shared post about X.
Anthropic released a report on Friday saying it had intervened to prevent its Claude models from being used for potentially harmful activities such as cyber espionage, weapons design and mass surveillance.
Users of the model had asked it to act as a software engineer and perform a variety of tasks, including creating missile guidance and flight control software. This was a request from users in northern Yemen, where the Iranian-backed Houthis have stepped up missile operations targeting Saudi Arabia.
The company says other users have also tried to use Claude to create military-grade biological weapons.
The company said many of these attempts were thwarted by internal safeguards and test fires appeared to have failed, but there was no evidence the group was able to use effective weapons.
AI stock plummets
Fears of out-of-control AI are already impacting the industry, prompting Altman to postpone OpenAI’s IPO, which had targeted a valuation of up to $1 trillion in its stock market debut. OpenAI is one of three AI companies thought to have a market capitalization in the $1 trillion range.
AI stocks tumbled around the world Monday morning after days of warnings from AI company executives.
Wall Street’s tech index, the Nasdaq 100, fell 1.7% in early trading. Semiconductor stocks, which have been leading the AI rush, fell the most.
“If this leads to a slowdown or rethinking of AI spending, it’s going to impact some important sectors of the economy and the stock market, because we’re in a very strong position essentially based on AI spending,” said Steve Sosnick, chief market analyst at Interactive Brokers.
Philadelphia’s Chip Index fell 6%, Nvidia fell 3.5%, Advanced Micro Devices fell 5.6%, Micron fell 6.7% and Mr. Musk’s SpaceX fell 2.5%.
Semiconductor equipment maker Lam Research & Applied Materials fell 8%, Applied Materials fell 7%, tech giants Bloom Energy fell 8.9% and GE Vernova fell 7.6%.
The European technology sector fell 2.3%, led by heavy declines in Infineon and Siemens Energy, as well as a 6.7% decline in ASML. In Asia, SoftBank fell by up to 13.2%, and semiconductor manufacturers TSMC and SK Hynix also fell.
