US President Donald Trump has no concerns about AI leading to human extinction. “No, I don’t have any,” he told reporters on Thursday, as he left Dallas. Jeff Mason reported the exchange for Bloomberg.
Trump said his worry was losing the race. “I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position,” he said. He put the US lead over China at about a year, “which is, you know, considered a lot”, CNBC’s Kai Nicol-Schwarz reported.
His answer came in a week of warnings. Employees at Anthropic and OpenAI spoke out. So did members of Congress and the European Commission. Washington and Beijing, meanwhile, prepared for a summit.
What the lab employees said
It started with Jacob Coxon. The pretraining researcher resigned from Anthropic this week. On X, he said Anthropic and OpenAI were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. The people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”, he wrote. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate, then told the BBC that a 10% chance of AI wiping out humanity within a decade was “not unreasonable”, Business Insider reported.
