Trump dismisses AI safety concerns as ‘hoax’ as tech leaders call for slower development

USA: President Donald Trump launched a sweeping defence of unfettered AI development on Monday, dismissing growing calls for regulation as a “hoax” and a “scam” in a series of Truth Social posts. He also accused those raising concerns about AI risks and data centre expansion of conspiring against American technological dominance, according to CNBC.

In his fifth AI-related post of the day, Trump called himself the “Hoax Buster” and drew a direct comparison between AI safety concerns and climate change warnings. “The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change,’” he wrote.

Trump went further in subsequent posts, writing: “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

What triggered the outburst

The posts arrived amid a sudden and unusual convergence of AI safety warnings from within the industry itself, CNBC reported.

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” arguing for slower AI development to “reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.” Days earlier, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon had quit his job and issued a public warning that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” accusing both OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk both said over the weekend that they agreed with calls for a slowdown. Altman reportedly met backstage with Trump at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on Thursday, according to CNBC, citing MS NOW.

Trump dismissed the industry’s self-regulation calls with pointed scepticism. “Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?” he wrote.

The administration’s position

The Trump administration has broadly encouraged rapid AI growth and the development of data centres across the US as part of its strategy to maintain a technological edge over China. White House AI czar David Sacks pushed back on the safety concerns on Saturday, writing on X that tech companies should “go ahead and pace the frontier” themselves rather than seeking government intervention, and questioning whether the motivation for slowing down was “purely altruistic.”

Sacks also noted that China would be “very unlikely” to join any global AI regulation agreement.

House Speaker Mike Johnson reinforced the administration’s stance on Sunday. “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China,” he told CNN. “We don’t need everybody to panic right now.”

Any Congressional action on AI regulation appears highly unlikely before the November midterms, with House members set to leave Washington on Thursday and remain in their districts through October, CNBC noted.