Trump downplays AI warnings, citing competition with China

President Trump on Sunday downplayed the growing concerns over artificial intelligence’s rapid development and its implications for the future of humanity, saying guardrails can be placed on the technology but that the U.S. cannot lose the AI race to China in the process.

“Well I say this, we’re leading China on AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world and frankly I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump told reporters at his golf club in Doonbeg, Ireland, according to a White House pool report.

“And we can put guardrails, and we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” he added.

The president’s comments come days after a former Anthropic and OpenAI employee, Jacob Coxon, claimed in a post online that researchers at the firms “believe AI could kill all humans” but still push forward in a race to develop superintelligence — a hypothetical AI agent that outperforms all humans’ cognitive performance.

Coxon’s assessment went viral and prompted a chorus of officials, lawmakers and even some celebrities to sound the alarm on the potential dangers of AI.

Also on Sunday, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) weighed in on the topic, with the latter pushing for Congress to act urgently on AI safety. Johnson, echoing Trump, urged caution.

“If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American. So, we’ve got to have balance. We’ve got to have steady hands at the wheel,” Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

“But we don’t need everybody to panic right now,” he added later. “We need to handle this new technology like we have others in the past, and make sure we’re doing everything we can, responsibly, to also not smother American innovation. We have to do both things simultaneously.”

Trump recently has railed against critics of data centers, the AI infrastructure that has become increasingly unpopular among Americans. In the Oval Office last week, he suggested that data centers’ opponents want to “go through poverty, crime and squalor.”