Former President Barack Obama called for government regulation of artificial intelligence (AI )in an interview Friday, criticizing President Donald Trump’s more free-market approach to the blossoming technology.
Speaking with Colgate University president Brian Casey on the upstate New York campus on Friday, Obama warned that AI could be “chaotic and potentially catastrophic” if it fell into the wrong hands or was not given tighter constraints.
“The good news is, is that AI is a tool,” the former president said before an auditorium full of students. “It’s a machine. It’s built to give you the illusion that it’s not, but it is. It’s a really sophisticated, remarkable technology, but it should be thought of as a tool, which means we have choices in terms of how we use this.”
After remarking that if properly trained, AI could “vastly accelerate our ability to rid the world of cancer” or “come up with a safe formula for nuclear fusion” to provide zero-carbon emission energy, Obama noted, “Really useful stuff, but if we get this wrong, it could be chaotic and potentially catastrophic.”
“My view this week has been it is good that some of the leading companies have said we need to slow this down, and we should encourage that,” he continued. “There have been some on the left who’ve said we shouldn’t allow them to make that decision. I agree that that can’t be a long-term solution.”
“Government has to be regulating this,” Obama argued.
OpenAI revealed last Wednesday that it has found six new instances of “unexpected or concerning model behavior” over the past six months. CEO Sam Altman endorsed a call from rival AI company Anthropic to slow the pace of the technology’s emerging capabilities a few days later.
In an essay posted Saturday by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, he wrote, “To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this.”
Amodei proposed a three-step plan, the first of which he “calls on governments to require other frontier companies to match” across the United States and the world.
The Anthropic chief claimed that his company has already “unilaterally” committed to that first step, which involves giving third-party experts employee-level access so they can evaluate their AI’s safety and security.
He claimed that “slowing down” and “a coordinated pacing strategy” could be implemented without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”
The essay, which prompted heavy debate on social media, came soon after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation over concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.”
Coxon, who also formerly worked at OpenAI, claimed that the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
He received public support from two of his former colleagues, including Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger, who wrote on X, “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
Not only did Altman endorse Amodei’s call for a slowdown on AI, but so did SpaceXAI founder Elon Musk:
Continuing his remarks at Colgate, Obama criticized the current president and his administration:
I heard one of Donald Trump’s main advisers on this make the argument that the market will take care of it. These companies will solve the safety issues because they have every incentive to do so. If it turns out to be dangerous, people will just sue them. And they’re worried about financial liability.
That’s not how we treat airlines, or drug companies, or food companies. We now have 150 years of experience just letting the market do whatever it wants when it comes to things that deeply affect our health and our safety.
And so there’s no replacement for an effective government regulatory structure. And the challenge we have is that obviously, we have a president currently that has said that’s for losers. So, we’ve got a gap, at least of a couple of years, where things are moving really fast, and we have an administration that is not capable of or willing to, I would argue both, of putting together a serious regulatory framework, which is why I actually think we should be encouraging some sort of voluntary industry restraint, not because it’s a replacement, but because that’s probably the best we can do for now until we can get Congress and the White House to start getting serious about this.
Trump announced on Saturday that he will launch an “AI Force” and appoint a “czar” to lead it, without including many details on its structure or what exactly it would do:
On Monday, Trump announced on Truth Social that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other law enforcement bodies “will rein things in if we have to,” in regards to AI:
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.