US President Donald Trump today promised the US government wouldn't limit the development of artificial intelligence despite calls for caution from top executives of AI firms, who are gathering in Washington.
"I will never stifle the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution," Trump said at the unveiling of an AI chatbot, America.gov, intended to help Americans navigate government services. "We can’t stifle it, and we're leading by a lot."
Top AI executives lunched with Trump at the White House Tuesday, including Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Elon Musk, whose X social media platform includes its own AI model, Grok.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang sat to Trump's right at Tuesday's White House lunch, according to a seating chart the president posted on Truth Social. Musk sat to Trump's left. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella also attended.
Trump's confidence in AI is in sharp contrast to the alarms sounded by AI executives in recent days. Amodei earlier this month called for leading firms to slow down their development of the technology. On Monday, OpenAI said it delayed the release of its latest AI model because of safety concerns voiced by its researchers. The developments follow multiple reports of AI agents going rogue.
Also on Tuesday local time, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said in a television interview that the company is increasingly focused on safety.
"We are pacing our progress, which includes sometimes not training a model," he said on CNBC. "We have to do these in a way where we can make very confident safety cases and claims, so that people don’t have a bunch of anxiety."
For his part, Trump on Tuesday portrayed the race to develop AI as largely a global competition between the United States and China, with the US in the lead. He said there would be a winner and a loser, with no "second place".
The two countries agreed last week to establish a channel for handling AI-related incidents during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Washington. But Trump underscored Tuesday that he didn't want to cooperate too much with China: "I didn’t want to do anything, because we’re leading. Why would I want to do anything?”
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