Trump dismisses AI extinction risks as more than a dozen OpenAI, Anthropic insiders call for a slowdown - CNBC

Asked whether artificial intelligence might one day end the human species, President Donald Trump offered the sort of answer that usually precedes a shrug and a change of subject: 'No, I don't have any.' Concerns, that is — none, not a flicker. What he does have concerns about, he told reporters, is winning, because if the United States doesn't win AI, it will be 'put in a very bad position.' It is a bracing piece of moral accounting: extinction is a hypothetical, but second place is a genuine emergency.

Meanwhile, more than a dozen people who work inside OpenAI and Anthropic have signed a call for a slowdown — the same corner of the industry whose warnings we noted were gathering pace as researchers left Anthropic and Google for METR. Notice the shape of that. The people with the most information about what these systems actually do want less of it, faster to stop; the people with the least information want more of it, faster to go. CNBC's 'more than a dozen' is a lovely piece of arithmetic — precise enough to sound like reporting, vague enough to protect everybody named in it.

No faction in this story has an incentive to slow down, which is the whole problem wearing a horse-race costume. 'Put in a very bad position' is the phrase that will outlive the quote it sits in, because every arms race has run on that exact sentence and it has never once been wrong about the position. The only genuinely novel detail is the presidential answer to the extinction question. In most jobs, 'I don't have any concerns' is negligence. In this one, it's a strategy, and on the evidence of the past few years, probably the honest one.