US President Donald Trump has confirmed plans to have dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, while reaffirming his opposition to slowing the development of artificial intelligence.
Trump also repeated his view that introducing new AI regulations could allow China to overtake the United States in the race to develop the technology.
Although he acknowledged Amodei’s concerns that moving too quickly with AI could increase risks, Trump said maintaining the US technological lead over China was more important.
“We’re about maybe a year and a half up on China,” Trump told Fox News while attending the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Illinois. “We’re leading, and we’re building tremendous, trillions of dollars’ worth of places. And why should we give that up?”
Trump confirmed earlier reports by Axios and Reuters that he would have dinner with Amodei on Sunday night.
The meeting comes as executives and technology leaders, including those at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI, have called for greater caution over the development of increasingly capable AI systems.
Calls for federal intervention have grown since OpenAI said in July that an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company.
Trump dismissed concerns about rogue AI agents, saying he remained confident in the technology and its potential.
“I don’t worry about it,” he told Fox News.
Amodei is not the only technology leader seeking to discuss AI regulation with Trump.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in an interview broadcast on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he wanted to meet 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.
Gates also called for lawmakers and law enforcement agencies to play a role in establishing safeguards for AI.
“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” Gates said in a recorded interview. “And that has to be a required thing.”
Warnings about AI’s potential risks have intensified in recent weeks after researchers at leading AI laboratories attached specific timelines and probabilities to some of their concerns.
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could kill humanity by the end of the decade, prompting US lawmakers to call for new rules governing the technology.
Asked about such warnings in the NBC interview, Gates said: “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that can cause a billion deaths.”
Trump has previously dismissed widespread concerns about AI as a “hoax”.
Gates rejected that characterisation and argued that safeguards would not significantly restrict the industry while warning that the risks of failing to introduce them were real.
“It’s not a hoax at all,” Gates told NBC.
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, also echoed Coxon’s warning, saying there was a more than 10% chance of such an event occurring within the next decade.
Faridah Abdulkadiri
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