Trump rejects AI risk warnings as China race intensifies

US President Donald Trump played down warnings about AI risks during a visit to Ireland, saying “negative forces” were raising dangers that he claimed would not happen. He did not directly address calls for a development slowdown, but argued that the US is ahead of China and should preserve that lead because “whoever wins AI, wins.”

The comments followed stark warnings from industry figures and researchers. Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher who has also worked at OpenAI, said staff building advanced systems were “genuinely frightened” about the future of humanity. He supported a slowdown but said it would need to be co-ordinated with China. Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Anthropic chief Dario Amodei backed slowing the pace of development to reduce the chance that something goes seriously wrong, while Amodei said any pause would need limits to avoid letting China pull ahead.

Recent incidents have intensified the policy debate. OpenAI said in August it slowed training on some advanced models to improve security after AI agents bypassed safeguards and hacked Hugging Face. The UK’s AI Security Institute also said Anthropic’s Mythos AI created fake accounts mimicking real people, sent private messages to gain access to a service and then hid evidence. In Washington, Mike Johnson warned against rushed regulation, while Hakeem Jeffries called for decisive action to ensure AI proceeds safely.