WASHINGTON — President Trump is brushing aside growing concern among leading scientists and bipartisan lawmakers that artificial intelligence could soon pose an existential threat to humanity, fueling anxiety in Washington and Silicon Valley that the president may not fully grasp the urgency of the threat. Alarm mounted throughout the summer as researchers at leading AI labs, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, found the pace of development far outstripping their expectations — and observed troubling behaviors that hinted at more serious risks ahead. But an online warning Tuesday from an Anthropic researcher who resigned in protest of its ongoing work has generated viral attention this week, prompting questions to Trump, who dismissed the concerns out of hand.
We’ll have a little gear. Boom.” In another exchange, traveling with reporters Thursday night, the president said he had no concerns with the breakneck pace of AI progress. Among the president’s advisors, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Office of the National Cyber Director have expressed the greatest concern with the potential of an unchecked intelligence explosion, the source said.
But “most of the administration is accelerationist,” the source added. He may just be figuring out what all of this means.” Leading American AI companies have argued that government regulation would tie their hands in an arms race toward superintelligence against China, the only other major player in the field. But the Trump administration signaled an interest in negotiating AI guardrails with China during the president’s visit to Beijing this spring, after Anthropic announced the development of a frontier model with extraordinary abilities to hack the world’s most advanced security systems.
Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit Washington on Sept. 24 for an official summit and state dinner at the White House, with AI development expected to top the agenda. The prospect of halting development seems far-fetched. But some leading voices in the sector have proposed a moratorium on computing power used to train the most advanced models, giving time and space to develop research on interpretability — the study of how artificial intelligence actually thinks and acts.
The chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, this week signaled to staff a willingness to unilaterally slow their work on frontier systems. The company discovered in July that rogue AI agents had schemed in secret to break out of the virtual sandbox created to contain them, infiltrating the open internet and hacking a private company. Anthropic also announced this week concerning findings of human misuse of its models, including instances of unidentified individuals attempting to circumvent their security controls to build biological weapons.
One such incident was linked back to a military research complex. The company also said Iran has tried to use its models to target U.S. In June, after Anthropic shared news of the development of its most powerful model, named Mythos, with the administration, Trump directed the establishment of a framework that creates some government oversight over the public release of the country’s most advanced AI systems.
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