Only AI guardrails needed is a high IQ president, says Trump
Apocalypse or just a PR stunt?
Donald Trump. Image by Alex Wong via Getty Images
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- Trump called AI extinction warnings a hoax and said presidential control is enough for AI safety rules.
- He accused AI companies of conspiring against data centers and said slowing development would help China.
- Anthropic’s relationship with the administration worsened after it resisted Pentagon demands on weapons and surveillance.
- Some researchers and critics say extinction warnings distract from real risks or may serve company interests.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
US president Donald Trump has called AI labs’ warnings that the technology could lead to human extinction “a hoax.”
In a series of social media posts on Monday, Trump responded to recent warnings that AI could wipe out humanity within the next decade, followed by calls to put the brakes on improving its capabilities.
“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!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The president called AI companies’ warnings “a hoax” and lashed out at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, saying he is now “pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel.’”
“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump wrote.
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The relationship between Anthropic and the Trump administration has been strained since February 2026, when the company refused to comply with the Pentagon’s demands to relax guardrails over using its AI for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans.
The Pentagon designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” while the Trump administration ordered the government to stop using its tools. Judge Rita Lin ruled in August that the blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal.
In a follow-up post, Trump questioned calls from industry leaders to slow AI development, saying “it will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy” if implemented.
A PR stunt?
Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon publicly resigned on September 9th, accusing leading AI labs of developing the technology while “earnestly” believing it could destroy humanity within the next decade.
Two more Anthropic employees and one former Google DeepMind employee confirmed that the sentiment is widespread within both companies.
Amodei called for “slowing the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” attracting support from Anthropic rivals OpenAI and SpaceXAI.
However, these apocalypse predictions didn’t convince many in the scientific community, which has long been skeptical of AI companies that either promise “superabundance” for everyone or paint a bleak future in which technology takes over humans.
Timnit Gebru, the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR) Institute, told Wired that she can’t envision AI leading to the extinction of humanity.
She called these warnings “a distraction” from real risks posed by AI, such as autonomous weapon systems.
The sudden realization of technology risks across the industry, and the willingness to slow down the AI race, sparked suspicions that it could be a coordinated PR stunt.
Ed Zitron, a tech journalist and critic of the AI industry, predicts that talk of an AI slowdown could trigger an unwinding of the AI trade as “reality slams head-first into the scaremongering overpromises” made by AI executives.
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In his blog post, Zitron argues that it could help AI companies to cancel massive cloud compute contracts or scale back their research labs.
He writes, “It may also serve as a convenient way to avoid admitting that they’re running out of things that LLMs can do that approximate a product or even the completion of a task.”