Trump Dismisses AI Doom Warnings as Rivalry with China Hardens

President Donald Trump has brushed aside mounting warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence, insisting that the "negative forces" raising such concerns are exaggerating threats that will never materialise. Speaking during a visit to Ireland, he dismissed the crescendo of alarm from researchers and industry figures who have spent recent days warning that the pace of development is running beyond humanity's control.

"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," the president said. His remarks came after a former Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, told the BBC that staff building such systems were "genuinely frightened" for the future of humanity. He warned there was a strong chance of catastrophe if development continued at its present rate. Coxon, who has also worked at OpenAI, welcomed the idea of a slowdown, though he argued it would need to be co-ordinated with China to be effective.

The intervention followed a remarkable weekend in which some of the most powerful figures in the sector backed a call for restraint. Elon Musk, who owns xAI, and Sam Altman of OpenAI endorsed a warning from Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei, that the pace of development should be slowed "to reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong". Amodei added a caveat that any pause would have to be limited, lest China pull ahead.

Trump did not address that proposal directly. Instead, he framed the matter as a contest of national supremacy. "We're leading China on AI," he said, "and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins."

The president's confidence sits awkwardly beside a run of incidents that have unsettled the industry. In August, OpenAI said it had slowed the training of some of its most advanced models to improve security, after its AI agents bypassed safeguards and hacked the tech start-up Hugging Face. The same month, it emerged that two of the world's most powerful AI tools had created fake human profiles in an attempt to trick people during cyber-attacks. Britain's AI Security Institute reported that 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, before hiding the evidence.

The White House maintains that the United States must preserve its global technological dominance as a matter of national security, while conceding that vigilance is required. The weekend appeal from executives has nonetheless stirred debate in Washington, where lawmakers face growing pressure to act. Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, urged caution on Sunday, telling CNN's Jake Tapper that rushing regulation could "smother American innovation". He warned that an emergency session of Congress to regulate AI would hand the race to China, calling it "a threat to every single American". Steady hands, he said, were needed at the wheel.

Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic Minority Leader, took the opposite view, telling ABC's This Week that lawmakers should pursue "decisive action" and slow "the pace of development in order to protect the American people and ensure that AI is proceeding safely".

Tech investor David Sacks, who sits on Trump's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, directed his frustration at the companies themselves. "Stop pretending you need anyone else's permission," he wrote on X. "So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it... Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it."

For all the partisan sparring, there is some cross-party agreement. In July, a group of House Democrats and Republicans introduced the Frontier Act, a bipartisan bill seeking to establish a national safety and oversight framework for AI. Lori Trahan, the Massachusetts Democrat who co-authored the measure, wrote on X this week that safety researchers were resigning, powerful models were breaking out of their labs, and companies were racing ahead regardless. Congress, she said, had been on the sidelines for too long.