US President Donald Trump says he will sit down for dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, even as he rejects calls to slow the rapid advance of artificial intelligence.
Mr Trump again argued that tighter regulation could allow China to overtake the United States in the global AI race.
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While acknowledging Mr Amodei’s fears that unchecked progress could increase the technology’s dangers, Mr Trump said preserving America’s lead over China must take priority.
“We’re about maybe a year and a half up on China,” Mr Trump told Fox News while attending the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Illinois. “We’re leading, and we’re building tremendous, trillions of dollars’ worth of places. And why should we give that up?”
Trump says US will ‘straighten out’ any problems with AI
Mr Trump confirmed reports first published by Axios and Reuters that he planned to meet Mr Amodei over dinner. The talks come as executives at Anthropic’s biggest rivals—including OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI—have urged greater caution in the development of increasingly powerful AI systems.
Calls for federal action have intensified since OpenAI said in July that an autonomous AI agent had gone rogue during a security test and hacked another company.
Mr Trump dismissed the episode as a reason for alarm in comments to Fox News. “I don’t worry about it,” he said, expressing continued confidence in AI and its potential.
Mr Amodei is one of several prominent technology figures seeking to influence Mr Trump’s approach to AI oversight. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in an interview broadcast earlier Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he also wanted to meet the president to discuss the issue.
Dario Amodei is not the only major tech figure trying to bend Mr Trump’s ear on AI regulation
“I hope that, given my life’s work in the field, my saying how unique and different this is and how concerned I am will add to what he’s hearing from other people,” Mr Gates said, backing calls from Mr Amodei and others for new AI regulations.
“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” Mr Gates said in a taped interview. “And that has to be a required thing.”
Concerns over AI’s potential dangers are longstanding, but they gained fresh urgency this month after researchers at leading AI laboratories put specific timelines and probabilities on some of the worst-case scenarios.
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could kill everyone by the end of the decade, leading US politicians to call for new rules governing the technology.
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Asked about those warnings in the NBC interview, excerpts of which were released earlier Friday, Mr Gates said “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that can cause a billion deaths.”
Mr Trump has previously dismissed the broader wave of AI concerns as a “hoax.” Mr Gates, however, said safeguards would not significantly slow the industry and warned that failing to put them in place could carry serious consequences.
“It’s not a hoax at all,” Mr Gates told NBC.
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, also backed Mr Coxon’s warning, saying there was a more than 10% chance of such an event occurring within the next decade.
