Leaders of several of the companies building the most advanced AI—including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Elon Musk—have called for slowing down the technology’s development. Donald Trump is confident that Americans need only one safeguard against AI-related dangers: himself.
CNN has the story:
President Donald Trump spent Monday angrily rejecting calls from AI industry leaders for more government regulation on their cutting-edge models, making clear in a daylong string of social media posts he considers outpacing China and preserving AI-driven economic gains a higher priority than addressing growing public concerns. ... Over four consecutive days, the president has continued to downplay the need for new safety checks. He said Monday the US already has “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!”
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, where he frequently posts AI-generated images and videos of himself. He said the administration had already prevented AI companies from doing “bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’” and singled out Amodei for “now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel.’”
Trump told the crowd at an AI summit in LA that he was genetically predisposed to understand the issue because his uncle taught at MIT. How much AI should be regulated is a legitimate policy question. Leaving it to the discretion of a narcissistic president who sings paeans to his own IQ is no answer.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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