Trump calls AI existential-risk warnings a hoax

President Donald Trump publicly rejected the case for slowing frontier AI, days after the heads of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI had jointly called for pacing the frontier. In posts on Truth Social and in a call to the All-In Summit alongside Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, he characterised warnings about the technology’s dangers as unfounded, NBC News reported, writing that the idea of “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.”

Trump dismissed the need for guardrails, arguing the only safeguard required was “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT”, and alleged a “SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers”, framing opposition to data-centre construction as a threat to US competitiveness with China. Communities that rejected the facilities, he warned, would become “backwards and poor”.

The remarks set the administration’s deregulatory, build-fast posture directly against the convergence that had formed among the frontier labs two days earlier, in which Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk had each argued for building slack between capability and safety. Where European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen wove the labs’ pacing argument into official policy the same week, the US president rejected its premise outright, underscoring how far apart the two governments’ stances on frontier risk had moved.

Trump returned to the theme five days later. In further Truth Social posts he listed attempts at “the decimation, or destruction, of AI” among what he called “Democratic hoaxes”, floated renaming AI — offering “Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence, or Supreme Intelligence” — and said he was “forming an AI Force, similar to the Space Force”, to be led by an AI “Czar”, TechCrunch reported; no details of either followed. Huang, who had agreed with the president on the All-In stage, defended the same position at length the following week, and Trump carried it into his summit with Xi Jinping, where he rejected new AI rules.