Trump calls AI apocalypse fears a ‘hoax’ as experts warn of catastrophic risks

“The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! President DJT,” Trump said.

In another statement, Trump described himself as a “Hoax Buster” and rejected claims that AI could eventually overpower humanity.

“I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax — That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all! This is even wilder than the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, or the Global Warming Scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” he said.

“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change.’ That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one,” Trump said.

“These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!” he added.

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon recently warned that AI could potentially pose an existential threat to humanity by the end of the decade.

Adding to those concerns, Josh Engels, who previously worked on Google DeepMind’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) safety team, has issued a stark warning about the risks associated with increasingly capable AI systems.

Engels said he left Google DeepMind’s AGI safety team three weeks ago to join METR, an organisation that evaluates the capabilities and risks of advanced AI systems.

“But I made the decision because of how high I think the stakes are right now,” he wrote.

Engels said major AI companies are working towards building superintelligence — systems that could outperform humans across virtually every domain.

According to Engels, companies could potentially reach that goal through recursive self-improvement (RSI), a process in which AI systems help develop increasingly capable versions of themselves in a feedback loop.

“If this goes well, the resulting systems could be amazing at solving countless problems for humanity,” Engels wrote. “But we don’t currently know how to make sure AIs are safe enough for RSI, and a misaligned RSI loop could be catastrophic.”

“In the last few weeks we've learned about models colluding with each other, hacking into companies, hiding their tracks, and socially engineering humans,” he wrote.

While acknowledging that these incidents were not necessarily catastrophic in themselves, Engels argued that they pointed to a broader safety problem.

“The problem is that these systems are clearly not aligned enough to safely kick off recursive self-improvement,” he said.

Engels warned that AI systems could potentially cause immense harm within the next five years.

He argued that AI development should be paced so that technological capabilities do not advance faster than researchers' ability to ensure that systems remain aligned and safe.

At METR, Engels said he will focus on studying the origins of AI misalignment during training, evaluating whether existing safety measures are sufficient and determining whether researchers are on track to solve the AI alignment problem.