President Donald Trump has vowed that his government will not limit the development of artificial intelligence, even as top executives of AI firms that have called for delays convene in Washington.
"I will never stifle the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution," Trump said on Tuesday at the unveiling of an AI chatbot, America.gov, intended to help Americans negotiate government services.
"We can't stifle it, and we're leading by a lot."
Top AI executives are having lunch with Trump at the White House on Tuesday, including Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Elon Musk, whose X social media platform includes its own AI model, Grok.
Trump's confidence in AI is in sharp contrast to the alarms sounded by AI executives in recent days.
Amodei earlier this month called for leading firms to slow down their development of the technology.
On Friday, OpenAI said it would pause the training of its latest model as reports multiply of AI agents going rogue.
Also on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a television interview that the company is increasingly focused on safety.
"We are pacing our progress, which includes sometimes not training a model," he said on CNBC.
"We have to do these in a way where we can make very confident safety cases and claims, so that people don’t have a bunch of anxiety."
Anthropic's reported warnings to investors
OpenAI meanwhile launched a new mid-range artificial intelligence model that costs five times less than its flagship offering, one day after scrapping an upgraded version deemed unreliable.
GPT-6.1 Sol ranks below OpenAI's most powerful model, GPT-6 Astra, released in early September. The company on Monday said it abandoned plans for GPT-6.1 Astra because the model frequently ignored instructions.
The announcement, made at the company's annual developer conference, marks the latest escalation in a price war with rival Anthropic as both firms prepare for initial public offerings.
Meanwhile, Anthropic has warned investors of potential "existential risks to humanity" in the prospectus for its highly anticipated initial public offering of shares, The Financial Times reported on Tuesday.
Citing people with knowledge of the so-called S1 filing to go public, the report notes the possibility of powerful AI models to operate beyond their predicted parameters, despite safety controls.
The warnings from the Claude maker come as industry insiders and government officials voice alarms over the dangers of a technology that has escaped oversight in a series of rogue incidents including hackings and joint cyberattacks.
