Trump shrugs off critics, warns US could lose race to China: “Whoever wins AI, wins”

on Sunday downplayed concerns over artificial intelligence after critics called for slowing down their development and said the United States (US) would lose to China in the AI race by failing to do so. The 80-year-old Republican leader called the critics "negative forces" and said they are raising the issues that never will happen.

“We’re going to do some very good things for Ireland,” Trump, a two-time US President, told reporters at his golf club in Doonbeg, Ireland.

“Well I say this, we’re ahead of China on AI. "We're the most sophisticated country in the world and frankly I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.

quoted him as saying. And we can put guardrails, and we can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”

The comments by Trump came after a blog post by Anthropic Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dario Amodei, who called for a slowdown in the "rapid development" of AI due to worries that "superintelligent computer systems" will surpass the cognitive abilities of humans.

In his blog post 'We Must Pace The Frontier', Amodei warned that the AI could "run faster" than human ability, if left unchecked. If AI continues at this rate, it will have complete control of the internet within the next six to 12 months, he said.

“We need to slow down the rate at which we increase the capabilities of AI models, it’s still going to feel fast and we need to make good use of the time that we buy,” he said. "Not building the technology deprives humanity of its benefits or simply puts AI into the hands of authoritarian powers, and building it too quickly is reckless. We have tried a middle way'.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, backed Amodei.

But the US government is establishing a voluntary security review process for advanced AI models before they are deployed, although the details of that program are murky. But industry observers are uncertain how effective it would be, given the Trump administration’s light touch, deregulatory approach to most industries, including tech.