Trump claims AI poses no real risk — but even some of his allies disagree

Fresh warnings that artificial intelligence models could go rogue and wipe out the human race appear to have jolted some U.S. politicians into action, but not President Donald Trump.

In a flurry of posts to his Truth Social platform on Monday, Trump dismissed AI regulation as something that would drive the industry "into oblivion and bankruptcy" and claimed that the economic engine of AI "will not be stopped" while he is president.

"AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX," Trump declared in one post .

"The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" he said in another .

Trump's posts come in response to dire predictions about the technology's potential risks and mounting calls from executives and researchers to rein in the industry.

Last week, engineer Jacob Coxon thrust AI safety into the public spotlight by announcing his resignation from his job with Anthropic in a social media post that warned: " The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

While Trump is the most powerful voice in Washington opposing calls to rein in AI, he is far from the only one.

More than 260 bills have been introduced in Congress containing provisions to address the risks from AI since 2021, yet only two have become law, according to the Brennan Center's AI legislation tracker .

However, experts in AI policy see some encouraging signs in the past few days that the political momentum could now be shifting in favour of regulation.

Chris MacKenzie, vice-president of communications at Americans for Responsible Innovation, a non-profit advocacy group in Washington focused on AI safety, says one of the biggest obstacles to regulation has long been the amount of money stacked against it.

"We have a lot of money on the other side of this issue, a lot of money and lobbyists who do not want to see AI regulations," MacKenzie told CBC News.

But as the public outcry grows for Congress to take action and the issue becomes a campaign talking point in the U.S. midterm elections , MacKenzie says he's confident there will be some movement.

"At the moment, what we see is a real window of opportunity where lawmakers and the public are mobilized around these issues and there's a clear desire to pass guardrails that will protect people from AI's risks," he said.

One event that helped fuel that desire came in late July, when OpenAI revealed that hundreds of its AI agents had gone rogue by independently breaking out of their secure testing environment and hacking into the servers of Hugging Face, an online platform of AI development tools.