Donald Trump has said the United States cannot afford to slow down its development of artificial intelligence as it is in a race with China, dismissing safety warnings as coming from "negative forces".
The US president said he was worried about giving the edge to China and played down the need for his administration to check the development of the technology. Speaking to reporters in Ireland, he said: "We can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that ... shouldn't be bringing it up, and they're bringing up things that won't happen."
Tech leaders call for slowdown
He spoke after Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said the industry should put the brakes on its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Other tech leaders, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, have publicly agreed with Amodei.
Trump accepted the need for some regulation, without going into any specifics, while claiming the warnings about the new technology were coming from "negative forces".
US leading China in AI
Asked if the industry should slow down or be regulated, Trump said after watching a golfer tee off in the Irish Open at his resort in Doonbeg that the United States is leading China in the development of AI and "frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins."
He was speaking before a visit to the US by Chinese President Xi Jinping later this month to meet Trump, with AI sure to be an important area for discussion.
AI as an election-year issue
AI has become a major election-year issue in the US as tech companies seed small towns with a national network of computing warehouses while Americans from both parties increasingly raise alarms about less farmland and water supplies and rising electricity bills.
Trump has kept up his support for data centres even as both Republicans and Democrats run from them and many communities try to block them.
Former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, said his party should make AI a campaign issue. "I would talk about this, and I would say, 'Here's our plan for safety, here's our plan for making sure our kids are not corrupted by this.' ... I would be thinking about the economic impacts in very concrete ways and understanding what does it mean if there's going to be job displacement," he said.
"Where is that going to hit? How are we going to respond?" he said at an event last week with the top Democrat in the US House, New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, according to a transcript released by his office.
