President Trump says you can trust him to keep AI labs in check. Why? Because he claims his administration once threatened to throw the leader of a major AI company in jail.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI,\u201d Trump said in an interview with CBS\u2019 60 Minutes<\/a>. \u201cWe said, \u2018Do you like the color orange? Go home right now, see your wife and children, give them a kiss good night, because tomorrow morning you are going to jail.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump did not say which executive received the threat, but he said they were the leader of \u201cone of the big\u201d AI companies. Given that he mentioned a wife and kids, one could reason that means it wasn\u2019t OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is married to Oliver Mulherin, or Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who doesn\u2019t have children. Trump clarified that he doesn\u2019t think the CEO acted \u201cmaliciously,\u201d and upon receiving the threat, the executive \u201ctotally changed everything,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting that Trump has made similar claims before, and he has specifically singled out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In a Truth Social post on September 14<\/a>, Trump claimed his administration had stopped \u201cAI \u2018people\u2019 from doing bad, or potentially bad, \u2018things,\u2019 like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a \u2018perfect little angel\u2019.\u201d Trump also boasted that \u201cthe only control or \u201cguardrails\u201d that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.\u201d It\u2019s unclear whether Trump was referring to the same incident he described on 60 Minutes.<\/p>\n His comments were broadcast in the middle of a very tense day for AI and its national security implications. On Sunday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted<\/a> that he had an affair with an executive that the United States is now accusing of espionage on behalf of the Chinese government. The woman was allegedly<\/a> recruited to gather information about Nvidia\u2019s most advanced hardware and potentially persuade Huang to lobby for loosening restrictions on chip sales to China. China has denied<\/a> the espionage allegations.<\/p>\n Reporters asked Trump about the allegations on Sunday night, and he said he hasn\u2019t spoken to Huang about it but hopes the executive will remain Nvidia\u2019s CEO.<\/p>\n \u201cI just know he\u2019s a fine person, but you never know what is going on,\u201d Trump told reporters<\/a>, adding that he would still be open to bringing Huang along with him on his trip to the Philippines and China later this month.<\/p>\n On 60 Minutes, Trump recounted the story as an example of how government agencies can be trusted to deal with AI safety risks, which he claims are blown out of proportion.<\/p>\n AI safety became a hot-button issue in September after Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger claimed<\/a> that employees at the company \u201cearnestly\u201d believed that AI could kill all humanity within the next decade. Hubinger, who personally estimated the risk at greater than 10%, made the comment in response to another Anthropic researcher\u2019s resignation<\/a>. Shortly after his comments sparked outrage and panic online, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay<\/a> warning that the current pace of AI development was unsafe and urging the industry to slow down while governments helped establish stronger safeguards.<\/p>\n At the time, Trump disregarded the concerns over AI development and calls for a slowdown as a hoax, but he did invite the executives from major AI companies, including OpenAI, Nvidia, Anthropic, xAI, and Google, to the White House to sign a voluntary AI safety standards agreement. The agreement was not a legal document, but Trump described it as \u201cmorally binding.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n But the Trump administration might be pushed to take the issue more seriously, especially after opposition to AI data centers became a significant issue in the midterm elections that ushered in major upsets for the Republican Party. Last week, voters delivered an overwhelming rejection of new data-center development in dozens of local ballot measures, passing restrictions on projects across the country<\/a> and electing candidates, mostly Democrats, who promised to keep a tighter leash on the industry\u2019s expansion<\/a> than their Republican counterparts.<\/p>\n Trump, who categorizes himself as an \u201cAI bull,\u201d said that he would be willing to work with the Democrats, who will soon regain the majority in Congress, on the issue of AI safety, but he doesn\u2019t believe in instituting strict safety guardrails.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t mind guardrails, but I don\u2019t want to put us in a deep second position,\u201d Trump said, referring to AI competition with China. \u201cI think the risk is not nearly as real as they talked, and I think the risk can be managed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Trump says you can trust him to keep AI labs in check. Why? Because he claims his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":965135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,11021,1376,8189,6494,61],"class_list":["post-965134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-dario-amodei","tag-donald-trump","tag-jensen-huang","tag-nvidia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=965134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/965134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/965135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=965134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=965134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=965134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}