US President Donald Trump said the government would not limit the development of artificial intelligence, even as senior executives from leading AI companies gathered in Washington and some of their firms called for greater caution.
“I will never stifle the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” Trump said at the unveiling of America.gov, an AI chatbot intended to help people negotiate government services. “We can’t stifle it, and we’re leading by a lot.”
Trump’s comments came as AI executives were scheduled to have lunch with him at the White House. Those attending included Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic; Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; and Elon Musk, whose X social media platform includes the Grok AI model.
The president’s confidence contrasted with warnings from several industry leaders about the risks of advancing the technology too quickly. Amodei earlier in the month called for leading firms to slow their development of AI.
OpenAI said on Friday that it would pause training its latest model as reports multiplied of AI agents going rogue. On Tuesday, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the company was increasingly focused on safety.
“We are pacing our progress, which includes sometimes not training a model,” Altman said in a television interview with CNBC. He said development had to proceed in ways that allowed the company to make “very confident safety cases and claims” and avoid creating widespread anxiety.
Trump presented the development of AI primarily as a global contest between the United States and China. He said the United States was leading and characterized the race as one with a winner and a loser, rather than a competition in which there would be a “second place”.
The United States and China agreed the previous week to establish a channel for handling incidents related to AI during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington. Trump nevertheless indicated that he did not want extensive cooperation with China while he believed the United States held the advantage.
“I didn’t want to do anything, because we’re leading. Why would I want to do anything?” he said.
The remarks highlighted a tension at the centre of the AI debate: the administration’s emphasis on rapid technological growth and US leadership, alongside concerns from some of the companies developing the technology that progress may need to be slowed or paused in certain circumstances to address safety risks.
