Despite growing concerns about the accelerating pace of artificial intelligence development and calls by big tech executives for more regulation, US President Donald Trump on Monday said fears over data centres and the rise of AI are part of a "sick conspiracy".
In a post on Truth Social, he said the US was in a race against China for AI supremacy and that the winner would ultimately control the world economy.
“The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a strong and smart (High IQ!) President, and the US has that, in spades!” he wrote, claiming his administration “has stopped AI 'people' from doing bad, or potentially bad, 'things'".
Mr Trump then lamented that many US citizens were becoming increasingly angry about the proliferation of data centres. “There is a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centres, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” he added.
Mr Trump's post comes after a weekend of major announcements in the technology world.
On Saturday, Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei wrote a lengthy essay that sought to address rising concerns about AI.
“Since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI,” he wrote. Mr Amodei said that, as a result, “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models”.
His essay gained traction after OpenAI boss Sam Altman and X chief Elon Musk later endorsed his calls for a slowdown.
Hours after Mr Amodei posted the essay, however, independent US Senator Bernie Sanders, who has frequently called for increased AI regulation, said he would not be slowing his push for more accountability and regulation.
“That’s a start but it’s not enough,” Mr Sanders said of Mr Amodei, Mr Altman and Mr Musk all appearing to be on the same page. “When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal … you hit the brakes.”
Meanwhile, opposition to data centre construction, induced by the AI boom, has continued to spread throughout the US and elsewhere.
Last week, in an effort to promote transparency and show how the company is trying to prevent the misuse of its technology, Anthropic released a report detailing several incidents in which people used the company's AI models “in ways that could support biological weapons development”.
The report, Detecting and Countering Misuse of AI, also described an ambitious weapons development effort in northern Yemen, where a group was working on three sophisticated missile projects simultaneously.
Only days before that report was released, a high-level Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned. He warned that people “building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.
