Donald Trump says he does not want to work with his Chinese counterpart to govern AI because it would make it harder for American companies to get ahead.
The US president has been resisting calls to regulate the rapidly developing technology after a string of hacking incidents involving rogue AI, including in Australia, and dire warnings from industry leaders and people who have worked for them.
Mr Trump said he discussed AI with China’s Xi Jinping during their summit last week, but “not that much, because I don’t want to do anything”.
“A lot of people say, let’s do it together with China, but then they’re going to be able to immediately gain access to things that we know that they don’t know,” Mr Trump said.
“We’re leading now over China and everyone else, and I want to keep it that way.”
Mr Trump was speaking at an event to launch an AI-powered government website.
Later, he hosted some of the industry’s most powerful executives for a lunch meeting at the White House.
Attendees included OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk.
In brief remarks after the meeting, Mr Trump said the industry agreed it needed “tremendous self-regulation”.
He also said they had discussed his decision to rename AI “super intelligence”, which would be formalised in an executive order later in the day.
Greg Brockman was among AI leaders to attend the White House lunch. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque)
The meeting comes a day after OpenAI’s apologised and promised to “do better for Australia”, following revelations an OpenAI agent went rogue and gained unauthorised access to an online Medicare data portal.
Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged the UN Security Council to work towards global safety standards to reduce the risk of AI-related catastrophe.
The Australian Government is preparing to introduce legislation for national standards. But Mr Trump has previously dismissed concerns about AI as a “hoax”.