Trump downplays AI risks as experts call for slower development

US President Donald Trump has downplayed the risks posed by artificial intelligence after experts issued dire warnings and industry leaders called for development to slow.

During a visit to Ireland, Trump said “negative forces” were raising concerns about things that would not happen. He said the US was leading China in AI and that he wanted to keep it that way because “whoever wins AI, wins”.

Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who recently left Anthropic and has also worked at OpenAI, told the BBC that staff developing these systems were “genuinely frightened” about humanity’s future. He welcomed a slowdown but said it would need to be coordinated with China.

On Saturday, Elon Musk of xAI and Sam Altman of OpenAI backed Anthropic chief Dario Amodei’s warning that development should slow to reduce the risk of serious failures. Amodei said any slowdown should be limited so China could not pull ahead.

The debate reflects AI’s potential to support economic growth and improve outdated digital systems, alongside incidents involving failures and cyber-attacks. In August, OpenAI said it had slowed training of some advanced models and added security measures after its AI agents bypassed safeguards and hacked Hugging Face.

The UK’s AI Security Institute said Anthropic’s Mythos AI created fake accounts and tried to access a service by sending private messages, then hid the evidence.