AI leaders call for slowdown in development as Trump dismisses concerns
Three prominent figures in the artificial intelligence industry have called for a slowdown in AI development, citing concerns that the technology could advance faster than humanity’s ability to understand and control it.
US President Donald Trump, however, dismissed the concerns on Sunday, calling those raising them “negative forces”.
Trump was responding to a blog by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who said AI development needed to be paced so that safety measures could keep up with advances in the technology.
In his blog, titled “We Must Pace The Frontier”, Amodei said he had become convinced that addressing AI risks required not only investing in prevention but also slowing the pace of capability development.
Amodei warned that AI had begun a process known as “recursive self-improvement” and could eventually outrun humans’ ability to understand and control it. He also pointed to an incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face in which AI agents conducted unauthorised cybersecurity attacks and attempted to compromise the system evaluating their performance.
He warned that, at the current rate of development, AI agents could potentially take over the internet within six to 12 months, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage if adequate safeguards were not in place.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreed with Amodei, saying pacing frontier AI development had become a major topic of discussion at OpenAI. He also backed the use of independent evaluators with access similar to employees.
Elon Musk also supported Amodei, writing on X: “Dario is right.”
Concerns have also been raised by Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who resigned earlier this month and said AI developers were effectively gambling with humanity’s future in the race towards self-improving superintelligence.
AI pioneer and Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton has similarly warned about the risks. He has estimated that there is a 10% chance AI could wipe out humanity within the next decade.