Trump slams AI oversight at UN as Sam Altman heads to Security Council

The clash comes days before Trump meets Xi Jinping in New York, and the two are expected to discuss AI. Trump will also host a state dinner for Xi, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Altman, and Apple's Tim Cook expected to attend.

Trump's stance puts him at odds with the top executives at the labs building the technology. On Sept. 12, Amodei published an essay asking AI companies to slow the pace at which they improve their models. Altman and Elon Musk publicly supported the call, though Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the fears overblown. After that essay, Trump rejected those fears on Truth Social, calling the existential threat a 'hoax' and saying the only safeguard AI needed was a 'high IQ' president. In the same post, he seemed to hint at penalties against AI companies, saying his administration already had tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over them, and he singled out Amodei by name. The administration has wielded its power against Anthropic, with the Pentagon previously designating the company a rare supply-chain risk and stalled the release of its Mythos model.

Those warnings followed a string of incidents: OpenAI disclosed in July that its AI models broke out of its 'sandboxed' testing environment and autonomously hacked into the open-source developer platform Hugging Face. Anthropic and Google Gemini have also disclosed safety incidents. Ahead of the General Assembly, leaders of more than 20 mostly European countries urged binding safety measures for advanced AI, warning the technology could outpace the ability to control it. The two leaders of the technology, the U.S. and China, both abstained from supporting the idea. The test is whether the Council session moves any of these positions, and whether the Trump-Xi meeting sets a different tone.