Senate Republican on Trump claim AI threat is ‘hoax’: ‘Come on’

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Tuesday criticized President Trump’s dismissal of rising concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence technology.

“Come on, it’s not a hoax. It’s a real thing,” Tillis, who is not running for reelection , told reporters at the Capitol.

“This is something that I’ve spent a lot of my professional career in, in terms of advanced technology,” he continued. “There are clearly guardrails that need to go around and anybody that told the president that this is a hoax should look at some of the things that Anthropic and some of the other leaders have seen.”

In a series of Truth Social posts Monday, Trump pushed back against calls from lawmakers and tech leaders to slow down the pace of AI development to allow time for proper safeguards and oversight practices to be implemented.

“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” the president wrote in one post.

He also pointed to competition with China to develop the technology, saying “whoever wins AI wins” generally.

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies to adopt several measures to “pace” the development of AI technology, including universal safety guidelines and external evaluations.

AI leaders such as Elon Musk, the CEO of xAI, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman supported Amodei’s recommendations.

“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Altman wrote on social media . “This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks.”

Tillis pointed to the support from within the AI community for further guardrails and oversight for the technology on Tuesday.

“Look, what CEO in the world who has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders would go out in public and say, ‘We need some guardrails on what we can do?’” he said.

“That by itself should invalidate any assertion that this is a hoax and something we shouldn’t be concerned with,” the senator added.