Obama rips Trump over AI policy amid ‘doomsday’ warnings

Former President Obama on Friday slammed President Trump over his handling of how to approach artificial intelligence (AI) amid “doomsday” warnings coming from some in the tech industry about the technology’s potential existential threat to humanity.

Obama said during an interview at Colgate University in New York that the federal government must regulate AI, before referring to comments made by one Trump adviser.

“I heard one of Donald Trump’s main advisers on this make the argument that, ‘The market will take care of ai,'” the former president said. “These companies will solve the safety issues because they have every incentive to do so — if it turns out to be dangerous, people will just sue them and they’re worried about financial liability.'”

“That’s not how we treat airlines,” Obama added. “Or drug companies, or food companies.”

Obama continued that AI could become a threat at a human level if it falls into the clutches of “bad humans” and if self-improving AI models realize they no longer need humans. He referred to Trump again in that his successor has said regulations on AI are “for losers.”

“So we’ve got a gap of at least a couple of years where things are moving really fast and we have an administration that is not capable of or willing to — I would argue both — putting together a serious regulatory framework,” Obama said.

He emphasized “encouraging some sort of voluntary industry restraint” as the “best we can do now” until both the legislative and executive branches “start getting serious about this.”

Obama has reportedly urged House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to make AI oversight a central tenet of his caucus’s agenda. The New York Times reported that he told Jeffries at a fundraiser that AI could be “dangerous” without congressional oversight.

On Saturday, Trump announced that he will develop an “AI Force” and appoint a “czar” to oversee AI development, though he said in his announcement that any concerns surrounding a lack of federal AI guardrails were a “hoax.”

The president also suggested that AI be renamed to “Superior Intelligence,” “Extreme Intelligence” and “Supreme Intelligence,” which he said were “far more elegant and accurate description[s] of this new phenomena.”

Trump notably opposed the Obama administration’s history of imposing regulations during his first run for president.

Bipartisan lawmakers have raised the alarm on AI development after former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon recently warned that the technology “ could kill us all ” by the end of the decade. Some lawmakers, namely Rep. George Whitesides (D-Calif.), have called for a slowdown to develop red lines on AI to allow Congress to step in and turn those red lines into law.

Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s head of alignment, affirmed that Coxon was “correct” in that “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans !”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei weighed in last Saturday, saying that development must slow down to allow for the implementation of necessary risk prevention safeguards.