President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Americans can’t “surrender to fears” about artificial intelligence, even as some of the tech executives he hosted in Washington have warned that their own technology poses serious risks to society.
Trump has touted AI’s promise as the United States and China compete for dominance in the field, signing an executive order that renames it “super intelligence.”
“We can’t stifle it, and we’re leading by a lot,” he said Tuesday at the launch of the federal government’s first AI-powered website, a chatbot called America.gov.
Anthropic and OpenAI, two of the industry’s leading companies, have publicly warned that AI could pose a threat to humanity and have called for guardrails. Both attended the AI summit and lunch Trump hosted. But when their executives stood alongside the president afterward with other industry leaders, the group struck a softer, more unified tone.
“There’s no conflict between innovation, technology and safety,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. “We are going to have to create new technologies to advance the capabilities of AI, but we’re also creating new technologies to advance the safety of AI.”
“All of this technology is being developed by the industry today, and you see behind me just an incredible number of leaders in our industry moving together as one,” Huang added, gesturing to the executives behind him, among them Tesla’s Elon Musk, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman.
Amodei, who had a private late-night dinner with Trump on Sunday, was more cautious.
AI “has very real risks,” he said. “How we address those risks is still under discussion.”
Trump told reporters that oversight of AI development would come down to “self-policing.” He announced that the companies had signed a voluntary joint commitment to develop AI safely and responsibly, which will include internal and external reviews of the technology. He also proposed creating a committee of 10 industry leaders to act as watchdogs, though the details weren’t immediately clear.
“I believe they’re going to be used for the good, and when they’re not, we’re going to be able to nab them,” the president said, referring to companies’ development of AI models. “But there’s going to be a tremendous self-policing aspect.”
Asked by MS NOW why Americans should trust AI companies to police themselves, Trump said the public should believe in them.
“They don’t want anything to go wrong,” he said, adding, “If something goes wrong, their companies are at stake.”
Despite the administration’s embrace of AI, with Trump dismissing the threat it poses as a “hoax,” Republicans remain deeply divided over it.
Even within the administration, some acknowledge the public’s wariness. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, told MS NOW he understands that Americans may be skeptical of AI, his own wife among them.
“When I say my wife has no intention of using this, I’m quite serious,” Oz said. “She’s just definitely not going to engage in this. She just doesn’t trust the system, and she’s not alone.”
“I think the bigger question is, is there a benefit for taking the risk,” he continued. “That’s the question that all people — Republicans, Democrats, independents — should be asking themselves.”
Laura Barrón-López contributed to this report.
The post Trump tells Americans not to fear AI. Tech leaders aren’t so sure. appeared first on MS NOW.
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