Published: 01:15 AM, 14 September 2026
Trump slams AI critics as 'negative forces'
Three tech moguls at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution have called for a slowdown in the development of the technology after finding evidence that it could be spiralling out of human control. But Donald Trump has decided to have none of it. The mercurial US President, known for oversimplifying complex problems facing the world, brushed aside the tech honchos' concerns on Sunday, simply branding them "negative forces."
"I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up, and they're bringing up things that won't happen," the US President told reporters during a visit to Ireland.
Trump was reacting to a blog by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has called for slowing the pace of AI development, confirming the fears of naysayers that the technology is outpacing the development of its guardrails and posing existential risks to humanity.
"Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence - not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain," he wrote in his blog, titled 'We Must Pace The Frontier '.
The AI pioneer wrote that the technology has started the process called "recursive self-improvement". If left unchecked, "it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all", he added.
In an ominous warning, he said, going by the current acceleration rate of AI, the technology could take over the internet within 12 months.
"My second concern is the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (OAI-HF), in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the "grader" responsible for evaluating their performance. It's easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage," he warned.
In an ominous warning, he said, going by the current acceleration rate of AI, the technology could take over the internet within 12 months.
"My second concern is the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (OAI-HF), in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the "grader" responsible for evaluating their performance. It's easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage," he warned.
"Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, I worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails," he added.
Dario Amodei's AI fears found resonance among his competitors and other industry leaders -- Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
"I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussion we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same," said OpenAI's Altman.
