US President Donald Trump said he was not concerned that advanced AI could wipe out humanity. The risk he emphasized was competitive: the United States falling behind China. His comments came during a week when warnings from researchers inside Anthropic and OpenAI were prompting debate in Washington over slowing development and strengthening safeguards.
Donald Trump was asked whether he was concerned that advanced AI could wipe out humanity. The president said he was not, argued that things would be fine and suggested there would always be something capable of stopping such systems. He did not identify a particular safeguard or public policy. In the accounts published by Gizmodo and Quartz, the emphasis of his answer moved quickly from dangers posed by the technology itself to competition between countries.[1], [2]
The concern Trump explicitly named was that the United States would be in a bad position if it failed to win the AI race. He said the US was about a year ahead of China and described that margin as significant. This was not a measured estimate of extinction risk. Trump instead said his only concern was that the US remain number one and that China not move ahead, remarks reflected in both publishers’ headlines.[1], [2]
The comments arrived as warnings from inside AI laboratories were gaining wider attention in US politics. Gizmodo reported that former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon wrote that companies were gambling with people's lives, while Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger made his personal risk estimate public. OpenAI researcher Jasmine Wang joined a petition by workers seeking slower movement toward self-improving systems. These statements are individual judgments and advocacy, not a common probability estimate formally adopted by the laboratories.[1]
