US President Donald Trump attributed the push to slow down the pace of AI advancements to "negative forces", in an interaction with the press at a golf tournament in Ireland on Sept. 13, largely ignoring warnings regarding its unchecked advancement according to reports on Sunday.
This comes after Anthropic's Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei penned a blog calling for pumping the brakes on AI advancement resulting from competition between various AI firms, advocating for more guardrails and caution in the matter.
ALSO READ: Amodei, Altman, Musk Halt Their Feud And Agree That AI Needs Slowing Down
OpenAI's Sam Altman echoed the call within hours, pledging to match Anthropic's move to give independent evaluators employee-like access to its systems. SpaceAI's Founder Elon Musk, whose public disputes with both men are well documented, replied with three words: "Dario is right."
Trump argued that the US is "leading China" in AI and said he wants to "keep it that way".
"We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins," Trump told reporters at the event.
"Whoever wins AI wins, and we can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up and they're bringing up things that won't happen," he added.
All three AI big tech figures conceded over the argument that the AI industry needs to slow down. Concerns began on Sept. 12 with a nearly 4,000-word essay warning that AI's growing ability to build its own successors, combined with a rogue AI agent swarm's cyberattack on Hugging Face in July, could spiral into far bigger damage within months.
"We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei said, adding that AI progress would remain rapid even with a slower development pace and that companies must make “wise use” of the time gained.
ALSO READ: 'Hit The Brakes': Bernie Sanders Pushes Trump, Xi To Halt AI After Top CEOs Call For 'Slowdown'
US Senator Bernie Sanders also urged US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to pause the development of advanced artificial intelligence, including superintelligent AI.
Sanders, who has introduced legislation seeking to prohibit superintelligent AI, said stronger action was needed. "When you are racing towards a cliff, you don't just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes," he said.
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