AFP via Getty ImagesUS President Donald Trump has announced that he will form an “AI Force” and appoint an artificial intelligence tsar amid warnings about the emergent technology.
In a social media post on Saturday, he said his administration “will not in any way hinder or stifle the growth” of the industry, and pushed back against calls to slow down the development of AI until better safeguards are put in place.
His post came as a slew of warnings about the potential dangers of AI have spurred calls for coordinated action on the technology’s development.
Trump offered no details or a timeline for his plan.
“AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country’s GDP,” he said on social media, adding that he wants the US to continue leading China in AI.
AI now sits at the heart of the US-China rivalry as the world’s two largest economies seek to gain an edge in advanced tech, and it is expected to be discussed when Trump meets President Xi Jinping next week.
Meanwhile, Trump said his administration would use the existing criminal and civil justice system to target any bad actors using the AI.
He also repeated comments that criticism and concerns around the potential dangers of AI are a “hoax”.
Claims by current and former researchers that the tech will endanger humanity – with one suggesting there is a greater than 10% chance of it “killing all humans” – have raised alarm bells in recent weeks.
Major AI companies have been racing to develop better systems, including creating what they call super intelligence – theoretical tech which is smarter than humans.
AI titans Anthropic, OpenAI and Google – the tech companies behind Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, respectively – have also disclosed instances of security breaches or incidents in which their chatbots were used for “malicious activity”.
Anthropic head Dario Amodei recently called for AI development to slow down and proposed industry-wide deceleration and regulation, as well as independent monitoring of AI model development.
Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI have both said they agree with his recommendations.
Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, told BBC that a “kill switch” that can be checked by a third party may need to be mandatory for the industry.
The warnings have prompted US lawmakers to propose legislation around the technology but Altman suggested this week that Washington has struggled to keep pace with the new tech and how to regulate it. He said people should have more faith in AI firms to keep it safe.
“The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this,” Altman told a conference in San Francisco.
In the UK, MPs across parties and peers have identified human rights risks posed by artificial intelligence and have argued that existing laws are ill-equipped to address the technology’s rapid growth.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) has published a report calling for a new bill on AI to “address the scale and seriousness” of such threats.
