Trump Pledges Not to Stifle AI Growth as Industry Leaders Urge Caution
Trump promised not to limit AI development at the launch of America.gov, even as executives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Amazon and X met in Washington.
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that his administration would not restrict the development of artificial intelligence, describing the technology as potentially larger than the industrial revolution.
Speaking at the unveiling of America.gov, a government chatbot designed to help citizens navigate public services, Trump said he would never hold back a technology of such scale. "We can't stifle it, and we're leading by a lot," he said, adding that the United States was maintaining a strong lead in the field.
The remarks came as leading AI executives gathered in Washington for a lunch with Trump at the White House. Among those expected were Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic; Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; and Elon Musk, whose social media platform X operates its own AI model, Grok.
Trump's upbeat message contrasted with recent warnings from some of the same industry figures. Amodei earlier this month called on leading firms to slow down their development of the technology. On Friday, OpenAI said it would pause training of its latest model amid a growing number of reports about AI agents behaving unpredictably.
Also on Tuesday, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said in a television interview that the company was placing greater emphasis on safety. He said the firm was pacing its progress, which at times meant deciding not to train a model, and that such steps were necessary to make confident safety claims and reduce public anxiety.