President Donald Trump dismissed apocalyptic warnings about artificial intelligence on Sunday, calling them “things that won’t happen” and arguing the United States must keep racing ahead because “whoever wins AI, wins.”
Speaking to reporters at his golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland, Trump said the United States is already ahead of China and that staying there matters more than slowing development. “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 said. He added that “we can put guardrails” but that “a lot of negative voices” are “bringing up things that won’t happen.”
The remarks came a day after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry to pace frontier development, arguing safety work is lagging as models advance faster. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk publicy backed a slowdown.
Amodei has warned that, at the current pace, advanced systems could within months be capable of coordinating large-scale internet disruption. Trump’s comments also followed high-profile departures from Anthropic.
Safety researchers Joe Benton and Jacob Coxon quit in protest and warned that leading labs were racing toward self-improving superintelligence. Coxon wrote that some people building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Anthropic alignment leader Evan Hubinger has said he personally puts the chance that AI “could kill all humans” within a decade above 10%.
Asked earlier in the week whether he had concerns about existential risk, Trump said, “No, I don’t have any.” He said his concern was that “if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position,” claiming the United States leads China “by a pretty good period.”
That stance puts him at odds with some lawmakers in both parties. Sen. Bernie Sanders has called even a small chance of human extinction “much too risky” and urged a halt to superintelligent AI. Sen. Ted Cruz has called the risks “deeply concerning” while still warning against falling behind China. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said AI executives should brief Congress on safety laws but has resisted a moratorium.
Trump has repeatedly framed AI as a contest on the scale of the internet or the Industrial Revolution. In recent interviews he has said medical breakthroughs already show the upside and that the United States “cannot afford to lose to China.” He has also argued guardrails exist and that China does not impose comparable limits.