Obama: AI's path hinges on choices made now, not on inevitability
Barack Obama says AI's impact — breakthroughs or catastrophe — depends on decisions taken now, and backs slower development and wider public debate.
Former US President Barack Obama has weighed in on the debate over artificial intelligence, arguing that the technology's consequences will be decided by choices made at this stage rather than by any predetermined outcome.
In a post on X, Obama said he was encouraged by recent calls from leaders of frontier AI laboratories to slow the pace of development, calling it a good and necessary first step. He added that the wider discussion about how AI should develop mattered just as much, and that it was encouraging to see the question move to the centre of public debate.
Obama, who said he has followed AI's progress for more than a decade, described the technology as advancing at lightning speed — faster, he suggested, than even those building it can track.
He rejected both extremes of the debate. He said he is neither an accelerationist who expects AI to produce a techno-utopia, nor a doomer convinced it will inevitably destroy humanity. Whether the technology yields major advances in medicine, energy and education, or instead drives economic disruption, deeper inequality and potential catastrophe, will depend on decisions being taken now, he said.
Those decisions, Obama argued, should not rest solely with the companies developing AI. They should be made by all of society, he said.
His remarks land amid a broader argument within the industry over how quickly increasingly capable systems should be built and what safeguards they need. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has urged the industry to slow down and proposed giving third-party evaluators continuing access to AI systems. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has backed independent evaluators while stressing safe development, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has floated peer review, under which leading AI companies would test one another's models before release. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also supported calls for a slower pace.
The debate has been sharpened by the public resignation of a former Anthropic researcher, who claimed companies were close to losing control of the technology.
Obama's intervention points to the question likely to define the next phase of AI: not only how fast the technology can advance, but how companies, governments and the wider public choose to manage its benefits and risks.