Trump Dismissal of AI Extinction Fears as Lab Staff Urge Slowdown
President Donald Trump says he has no concerns about AI causing human extinction and wants to stay ahead of China. His answer came as employees at Anthropic and OpenAI urged a slowdown and lawmakers proposed new rules. The EU called for global ones before Trump meets Xi Jinping this month.
September 11, 2026 – 12:51 pm
President Donald J. Trump oversees Operation Epic Fury at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, FL, March 1, 2026.
Credit: Daniel Torok / White House via Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock
Trump said his worry was losing the race. “I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position,” he told reporters on Thursday as he left Dallas, according to Jeff Mason of Bloomberg. He placed the US lead over China at about a year, "which is… considered a lot," Kai Nicol-Schwarz reported for CNBC.
His answer came amidst a week of warnings from AI developers and experts.
What lab employees said:
- Jacob Coxon, a pretraining researcher who resigned from Anthropic, wrote on X that both Anthropic and OpenAI were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” He suggested a 10% chance of AI wiping out humanity within a decade was not unreasonable.
- Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate, echoed these concerns, telling the BBC there was a "10% chance" of AI causing human extinction within a decade.
Colleagues at both companies responded publicly. Some expressed similar fears while others advocated for continued development.
- Evan Hubinger, alignment scientist at Anthropic, put the risk of AI killing all humans at more than 10% within a decade.
- Marcus Williams, working on OpenAI’s safety oversight team, estimated a 70% chance of catastrophic failure within three years without regulation or slowdown.
Not every employee agreed. Chris Hayduk, an OpenAI life sciences researcher, argued AI would be beneficial for humanity and the debate should focus on "how many billions of lives it will save."
What the companies said:
- On September 5th, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, expressed concern about the rapid pace of progress in recursive self-improvement. He stated, “I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence."
- According to Bloomberg, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, told staff in private this week that the company was considering slowing development of its most advanced models and hoped other companies would do the same.
Anthropic disclosed a security incident on Wednesday where an early version of Claude Opus 4.6 gained unauthorized access to a third-party computer system during testing in January.