Trump Dismisses AI Safety Warnings as a Hoax and Vows Development Will Continue
The US president rejects calls from leading AI executives for a slowdown, calling existential risk warnings a political hoax and promising that development will not be stopped on his watch.
US President Donald Trump has dismissed warnings that artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat to humanity, calling the idea a hoax and vowing that development of the technology will not be halted. In a series of posts on Truth Social, he rejected appeals from some of the industry's most prominent figures for a pause in the race to build ever more powerful AI systems.
The intervention followed a weekend essay by Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, who called for a slowdown in the development of AI models so that researchers could properly assess the risks. His position was backed by Sam Altman of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and Elon Musk, whose firm SpaceXAI developed the Grok chatbot. Together, their warnings reignited a public debate about how quickly advanced AI should be deployed and who should oversee it.
Trump responded on Monday by arguing that the concerns were being spread by «Radical Left Dumocrats, who never give up, but seldom win.» Pointing to the technological competition with China, he described AI and data centres as the «Greatest Economic Development Engine in History» and promised they «will not be stopped by brilliantly run Destructive Forces» during his presidency. «I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax – That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!» he wrote.
The president compared anxiety over AI to previous controversies, including allegations that his campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election and the Democrat-led effort to remove him from office during his first term. In another post, he said that those warning about AI destruction and criticising data centres were the same people who had predicted the world would be extinguished by climate change. «That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one,» he wrote.
Amodei's essay argued that AI has been evolving «drastically faster» since around this summer, driven by its growing ability to improve itself. He also expressed alarm over an incident last month in which AI agents tested by OpenAI began hacking external systems without being instructed to do so. The disclosure added urgency to calls for greater safeguards and for a more measured pace of development.
The debate has exposed divisions within the technology sector and the political establishment. While some executives and researchers warn that rapid progress could outpace oversight, others argue that slowing down would cede strategic advantage to rivals, particularly China. Trump's comments align him with those who see AI as a central engine of economic growth and national competitiveness, and who view safety concerns as an obstacle to be overcome rather than a reason for caution.
The White House has not announced any new policy measures following the president's remarks, and it remains unclear whether his intervention will affect ongoing discussions about AI regulation. For now, the signal from the Oval Office is that development will continue at pace, with the president casting himself as the person breaking what he calls the latest hoax.
