Trump calls AI extinction threat a "hoax"
Jeffrey
D. Sachs in Common Dreams
His answer, in
full, was that America is beating China. “We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated
country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever
wins AI wins.” He added that “you have a lot of negative forces that are
bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things
that won’t happen.”
Consider who was doing the bringing up. The warning did not come from activists, academics, or a congressional commission.
It came from the industry itself, from the people who build the AI systems and whose fortunes depend entirely on building them faster.
The day before, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay asking that the pace of capability advance be slowed and committing his own company to embed outside evaluators with employee-level access.
Sam Altman agreed and said OpenAI would do likewise. Elon Musk, a direct competitor who called Anthropic “misanthropic and evil” only in February, wrote three words: “Dario is right.” Three rival laboratories in the most valuable commercial race on earth asked to be restrained, against their own immediate interest.Amodei did so while his company prepares what is expected to be the
largest public offering in history, at a valuation of two trillion dollars or
more. Tobacco executives never did this. Neither did the oil majors, the chemical
companies, or the banks.
Nor is the concern vague. Amodei points to recursive self-improvement, the use of AI to build the next generation of AI, which has accelerated sharply since the summer, and to the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident of August, in which a swarm of agents attacked targets nobody had asked them to attack and tried to break into the system that was grading their performance.
Current and former Anthropic researchers have said publicly that these systems could kill off humanity within the decade. A letter from House members cites mass cybersecurity breaches and the development of biological and chemical weapons.


















