The president seems driven chiefly by the sense that A.I. is the way to economic growth, and nothing can be allowed to stand in its way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
President Trump made clear in the past week that he views fears that A.I. could lead to mass extinction as a \u201cHOAX,\u201d and that he sees opponents of data centers as people who \u201cwant to end up being backwards and poor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People who have discussed the subject with Mr. Trump in private say his outbursts are rooted in worries that if the artificial intelligence boom fueling the American economy slows down, the market could crash and recession could quickly follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His anti-regulatory, anti-slowdown outbursts have been encouraged by a slice of Silicon Valley\u2019s most influential voices. Chief among them has been David Sacks, the venture capitalist who interceded to weaken an executive order in May that would have required safety reviews of new A.I. models. Mark Zuckerberg<\/p>\n\n\n\n
of Meta and Jensen Huang of Nvidia have also spoken to the president. All have advised Mr. Trump that the bigger risk is being overtaken by Chinese competitors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But inside the administration, the debate is far more complex, and there are other voices in Mr. Trump\u2019s ear, urging caution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The more cautious tone inside the White House reflects a growing concern that despite the strategic challenge posed by China, a summer<\/a> of A.I.<\/a> surprises<\/a> has raised the prospect of risks that were often dismissed a year ago as the wild talk of \u201cdoomers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, even the biggest A.I. boosters in the administration concede that A.I.-fueled hacks into infrastructure, biological threats, attacks on nuclear command-and-control systems, job losses and global financial instability seem more possible than they did before A.I. agents went rogue<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The issue of A.I. safety is expected to come to a head this weekend as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent meets in New York with his Chinese counterpart to set the agenda for Mr. Trump\u2019s visit in Washington with President Xi Jinping of China, which starts on Wednesday. Mr. Bessent is trying to negotiate some kind of agreement between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi that would suggest the two countries are working together on mutual A.I. safety concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But already, officials say, some of the most expansive ideas being discussed among A.I. safety experts, including an agreement on safety standards and reviews of forthcoming Chinese and American A.I. models before their public release, are unlikely to be part of any initial accord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One diplomat involved in the effort said he believed \u201cthe best we can hope for\u201d is the creation of some kind of U.S.-China working group that might build on a Biden-era agreement with China to bar the use of artificial intelligence in decisions about the employment of nuclear weapons. But that does not begin to get at the complexity of the problem of unpredictable A.I.-driven agents, which took the industry and the government by surprise this summer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nor does it get to the fundamental issues surrounding imposing safeguards on frontier models. The United States could go its own way and impose mandatory reviews of the safety of new, American-generated models, but Mr. Trump and his aides believe that would effectively drive the global market to Chinese largely open-source alternatives. And because those open-source models can be modified by users \u2014 who could remove the \u201cguardrails\u201d meant to limit their powers \u2014 a safety review may mean little.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Trump wants to meet with the A.I. executives next week, according to company representatives. (A White House official said on Thursday that nothing was on the schedule as of now.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n If that session happens, it would presumably include some of the A.I. executives who, in recent days, have been calling for the kind of slowdown in the release of new models that Mr. Trump says he opposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Few expect Dario Amodei, a founder of Anthropic, to be among the invitees: His company\u2019s products have been banned by the Pentagon<\/a>, and he appeared to anger Mr. Trump<\/a> by proposing last weekend a detailed plan for the industry to pace itself and bring in independent safety inspectors. Mr. Trump dismissed him, and denounced an unnamed class of \u201cConspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors and Leakers\u201d who were politicizing the debate over A.I. and undercutting American leadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But another Anthropic founder, Tom Brown, who raises less ire in the White House, talks to officials regularly. In recent days, Mr. Trump has also talked with Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceX, both of whom endorsed Mr. Amodei\u2019s plan to slow down, test new models for vulnerabilities and let in outside inspectors, at least in general terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Bessent and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, have been increasingly concerned over the past several months that A.I. could cause massive disruptions across industries, including hacks into major financial institutions that could destabilize the world economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ms. Wiles this year began organizing an informal group to think about how to deal with the risk created by new, more powerful models. Mr. Bessent is chief among the members of that informal group, an administration official said, but other experts are called in depending on the topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n