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Prospects for serious AI regulation in the U.S. look bleak as President Trump repeatedly calls public fears about AI a hoax.
By Brad Randall, Broadband Communities
President Donald Trump is dismissing growing fears about the powerful capabilities of AI, all while calls for more regulation grow louder from within the AI-technology industry itself.
“The robots will not be taking over. The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world,” Trump told NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang via speakerphone Tuesday while Huang was onstage as a panelist at the All-in Summit in California. “The whole thing is a hoax.”
Trump’s comments arrive in the wake of new fears raised by whistleblower Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher who resigned from his post this month, citing serious ethical concerns.
“Gambling with our lives”
After his resignation, Coxon said Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives” by racing head-on to achieve self-improving superintelligence.
“Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote on X, adding that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Coxon has been among the names calling for stronger regulation around AI development. In his Sept. 8 posts, Coxon floated a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.
Meanwhile, Trump has been blaming Democrats for ballooning concerns about AI.
In a Truth Social post Monday night, Trump crudely said fears about AI were “reminiscent” to concerns about climate change.
In the post, he referred to Democrats as “Dumocrats” and called global warming a scam, sarcastically quipping that “everyone was going to die from extreme heat” before asking “what happened?”
He also posted that the only guardrails AI needs is a high-IQ president, referring to himself.
Americans are worried, polling says
The president’s comments appear sharply out of line with American public sentiment.
Recent NBC News Decision Desk polling, released Sept. 6, says 70% of Americans are more worried than excited about AI.
A similar number of respondents, 69%, said they oppose the notion of a data center being built in their local area.
Since Coxon’s comments after leaving Anthropic, the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has joined calls for the industry to collectively slow the pace of AI development.
He has also called for oversights like embedded third-party evaluators.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said he’d “welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI.”
In a lengthy post on Monday, Altman said OpenAI is shifting internally to focus on safe development.
Later, in the same post, he said “progress has been rapid and will continue to be. But it should be slower than it otherwise could be.”
AI development gained renewed attention this summer following the so-called Hugging Face incident.
The event, described as an unprecedented cyber incident by OpenAI, included 1,200 AI agents from OpenAI that accessed the internet, posted 70,000 messages on an unsanctioned message board, and banded together to hack the startup Hugging Face, according to BBC News.
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