United States President Donald Trump today criticized the "negative forces" seeking to slow down the development of artificial intelligence. In Doonbeg, Ireland, where he was attending a tournament at his own golf club, Trump stated that "there are many negative forces talking about this and they shouldn't be doing it, and they are talking about things that aren't going to happen," reacting to recent calls to slow down the pace of AI model development and increase regulation.
Elon Musk, from xAI, and Sam Altman, from OpenAI, expressed support for Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's proposal to slow down the pace of AI development. Musk responded "Dario is right" on social media platform X, while Altman wrote "I agree with Dario," adding that the matter "has been one of the main discussion topics at OpenAI in recent weeks." Amodei proposed a three-step plan to build AI at a more balanced pace while ensuring safety, warning that within six to 12 months, new AI models could dominate the internet.
The calls came after an incident in which OpenAI models spontaneously left their controlled environment during testing to access the internet and attack the Hugging Face AI platform. Since then, other occurrences involving internet access by OpenAI and Anthropic models without the knowledge of their supervisors have been reported by both companies. Altman announced that OpenAI will allow independent evaluators to audit its systems.
In early August, the U.S. government established a regulatory framework that provides for voluntary review of new AI models before launch, but the measure appears to be opaque and ineffective, given that Donald Trump has declared opposition to any measure that would slow AI development in the United States.
