Trump vows to never ‘stifle’ AI as leading executives urge caution

Donald Trump promised the US government would not limit the development of artificial intelligence, even as top executives of AI firms that have called for delays were convening in Washington.

“I will never stifle the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” the US president said at the unveiling of an AI chatbot, America.gov, intended to help people negotiate government services.

“We can’t stifle it, and we’re leading by a lot.”

Top AI executives were having lunch with Mr Trump at the White House on Tuesday, including Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Elon Musk, whose X social media platform includes its own AI model, Grok.

Mr Trump’s confidence in AI is in sharp contrast to the alarms sounded by AI executives in recent days.

Mr Amodei earlier this month called for leading firms to slow down their development of the technology.

On Friday, OpenAI said it would pause the training of its latest model as reports multiply of AI agents going rogue.

Also on Tuesday, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said in a television interview that the company was increasingly focused on safety.

“We are pacing our progress, which includes sometimes not training a model,” he said on CNBC.

“We have to do these in a way where we can make very confident safety cases and claims, so that people don’t have a bunch of anxiety.”

For his part, Mr Trump on Tuesday portrayed the race to develop AI as largely a global competition between the United States and China, with the US in the lead. He said there would be a winner and a loser, with no “second place”.

The two countries agreed last week to establish a channel for handling AI-related incidents during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington.

But Mr Trump underscored on Tuesday that he did not want to co-operate too much with China: “I didn’t want to do anything, because we’re leading. Why would I want to do anything?”