“No, I don’t have any”
President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he has no concerns about artificial intelligence leading to human extinction, and that his worry is losing the AI race to China. Asked by reporters as he left Dallas whether he was concerned that AI could lead to human extinction, Trump replied: “No, I don’t have any,” Gizmodo reported, following Bloomberg.
“I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position,” he said. “We are leading China right now by a pretty good period, I would say a year, which is, you know, considered a lot.”
Gizmodo noted that Trump has signed numerous executive orders aimed at cutting AI regulation and speeding up development in the name of national security and economic competitiveness. The answer was consistent with that approach, and it came in a week when warnings about catastrophic risk were coming from inside the companies building the technology.
The warnings he was asked about
The Next Web set out several of them. Jacob Coxon, a pretraining researcher at Anthropic, resigned and wrote on X that the companies were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence”. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, put the risk of AI causing human extinction above 10% within a decade.
At OpenAI, Marcus Williams, who works on safety oversight, put the risk at 70% within three years in the absence of regulation, and Julie Steele of the preparedness team wrote: “we need to slow down”. The Next Web noted that these were individual statements on social media, not a coordinated letter.
Congress and Brussels see it differently
Trump’s answer sits apart from proposals in Congress. Representatives Jay Obernolte and Lori Trahan proposed the FRONTIER Act in July, and Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar have introduced a Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, according to The Next Web. In Brussels, the EU’s technology chief Henna Virkkunen said that “global rules are really needed”.
The lab leaders moved the following day. On 12 September, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay calling on frontier labs to slow the pace at which they improve AI capabilities. Sam Altman said OpenAI agreed and would adopt Amodei’s proposal for independent evaluators with employee-like access, and Elon Musk wrote that “Dario is right”, Yahoo News reported.
That leaves an unusual alignment: the heads of the three most prominent US labs arguing publicly for a slower pace, and the president arguing that the priority is to stay ahead.
The Xi summit
The remarks set the backdrop for talks with China. Trump is due to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington later in September, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will lead the discussions on AI governance, according to The Next Web.
Amodei’s plan depends on exactly that kind of channel. Its third step calls for democratic governments to coordinate the pace of AI development with authoritarian ones, including China.
What to watch
The summit is the concrete test. If AI safety appears in its outcome as a subject for cooperation with Beijing rather than purely as a race, it will mark a shift from what Trump said in Dallas. If it does not, pressure for a slowdown will fall on Congress and the labs themselves.
