Incidents of rogue AI agents are not a cause for alarm, Trump told Fox News. “I don’t worry about it,” he said, adding that he remains confident in the technology and its potential.
Amodei is not the only major tech figure trying to bend Trump’s ear on AI regulation. In an interview that aired earlier on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said he would like to meet with Trump to discuss AI.
“I hope that, given my life’s work in the field, my saying how unique and different this is and how concerned I am will add to what he’s hearing from other people,” Gates said, echoing calls by Amodei and others for new AI regulations.
“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” Gates said in a taped interview. “And that has to be a required thing.”
Trump has previously described the chorus of AI concerns as a “hoax”. Gates argued that safeguards would not dramatically hinder the industry, and that the risks of not implementing them are real.
“It’s not a hoax at all,” Gates told NBC.
Warnings about AI’s risks are not new. But they took on added urgency this month after researchers in leading AI labs attached both a timeline and a probability to those concerns.
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade, prompting US lawmakers to call for new rules to govern the technology.
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, echoed Coxon’s warning, saying there was a more than 10 per cent chance of such an event within the next decade.
