Trump vows to never ‘stifle’ AI as leading executives urge caution

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday promised the government wouldn’t 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 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 will have lunch with Trump at the White House 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 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.”