President Donald Trump doubled down on the importance of developing artificial intelligence despite the potential harms on Sunday.
The statement comes just days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a blanket slowdown in AI development in order to ensure safety. Trump on Sunday appeared to push back on that sentiment.
“I’m not downplaying, but it’s, you know, it’s going to be more good than bad, but by a lot,” Trump told reporters when speaking of AI development.
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“But have you heard directly from any of them?” a reporter pressed, asking about AI tech leaders.
“I said it from the very beginning. Whoever wins AI, and we’re leading by a lot. Whoever wins AI wins,” Trump responded, going on to demur when asked if he uses AI himself.
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Amodei’s essay published Saturday also argued that a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.” He urged the Trump administration to implement more stringent limits on what AI chips can be sent to Beijing’s development facilities.
China’s foreign ministry dismissed Amodei’s statement as “fearmongering.”
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“Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest,” ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a Monday news conference.
Concerns over AI development burst back onto the scene last week after a developer from Anthropic resigned and publicly claimed the company was “gambling with our lives” with its research.
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Jacob Coxon, 27, who said he spent the past three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic, noted that it’s not a completely hopeless scenario.
Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, expressed his agreement with Coxon’s X post.
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“Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” he wrote on X. “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
“To be clear, as we say in our latest Risk Report, I think the risk from present models is low,” Hubinger added. “What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought.”
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