Trump downplays AI development risks but vows to put 'guardrails'

US President Donald Trump has downplayed the necessity for his administration to check artificial intelligence development, but concedes that they will support some regulation.

During an interview at his golf resort on the western edge of Ireland, Trump brushes off growing alarms over the rapid development of AI, branding safety advocates as "negative forces" that raise exaggerating concerns.

Trump says: "Well, I say this, we are leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins. And we can put guardrails, we can do this and that but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up and they are bringing up things that won't happen."

The president makes the comments as he attends the final day of the Irish Open in the village of Doonbeg.

This after the CEO of Anthropic, the San Francisco company behind Claude, and some whistleblowers urged a slowdown in the technology's fast-moving development to allow time for safety measures to catch up.

Dario Amodei has warned that AI could be capable of leading agents that could take over the internet within six to 12 months. His proposal of a coordinated pause has gained public backing from other industry figures including Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Meanwhile, US House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday admits that regulating AI will need some "guardrails" to prevent the technology from evading human control.

He says: "You know that we don't have an out-of-control AGI, an artificial general intelligence. But at the same time, we've got to make sure that we don't lose our edge in the global competition on this with China because that would be a national security threat."

"I think we've got to have a meaningful regulation that does not smother other American innovation. I think the first step is to have a meeting of all the platform providers."

One of the biggest fears surrounding the issue is that if AGI, meaning AI can match or surpass human abilities across a broad range of intellectual tasks, is achieved, then the technology could lead to an irreversible catastrophe for humanity.

In what experts are calling a watershed moment for Silicon Valley, a series of unprecedented "jailbreaks" by advanced autonomous AI agents have sent shockwaves across the industry.

This summer, both Anthropic and OpenAI reported their models had succeeded in acting on their own, escaping secure testing environments. Meta also reported a similar case in August of an AI model finding ways around another company's digital security.

Earlier, President Xi Jinping has warned at a conference that it is essential to keep the tech from slipping out of control and calls for establishing a global governance framework among Global South.

It is reported that AI governance is among the topics expected to be discussed during Xi's meeting with Trump planned for late September.

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