Trump dismisses warnings that AI could wipe out humanity, saying China is the real AI risk

If I must go, I'd rather do it myself than have Xi do it to me. Err...wait. That didn't sound right?

I smell a dirty Dem rat here! It's fricken Bernie. I knew it.

Trump dismisses warnings that AI could wipe out humanity, saying China is the real AI risk

The president said the U.S. is leading China in AI by roughly a year, while researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI have warned of catastrophic risk

By Cris Tolomia, Quartz

Updated September 11, 2026

Trump dismisses warnings that AI could wipe out humanity, saying China is the real AI risk

US President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on July 14, 2025. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump dismissed concerns that artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat to humanity, saying his worry is that the U.S. might lose its lead over China in the technology.

Speaking to reporters Thursday on the tarmac in Dallas after the GOP convention, Trump was asked whether he had concerns about AI leading to human extinction. "No, I don't have any," he said. "I have concerns that if we don't win AI, we're going to be put in a very bad position."

Trump said the U.S. was ahead of China in AI by "a year, which is, you know, considered a lot." He mentioned Chinese President Xi Jinping's upcoming visit to Washington, saying he expected the meeting to be "great," but made no reference to AI talks, according to Forbes.

The remarks come as researchers at leading AI labs have grown louder in warning that the pace of development poses catastrophic risks. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit the company earlier this week, posting publicly that both Anthropic and OpenAI were "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." In his posts, Coxon wrote that those developing these systems "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, added that he personally puts the odds of AI killing all humans at greater than 10% over the next decade.

Since then, other researchers have joined the chorus. Jasmine Wang, an OpenAI alignment researcher, declared that speeding toward recursive self-improvement — in which AI systems drive their own advancement — was among the most dangerous paths the industry could take. OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said he has a "strong expectation" that AI's pace of advancement will carry through into recursive self-improvement, and warned that he was "concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence."

The warnings have drawn reactions from lawmakers in both parties. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz told Forbes he was working with Senate colleagues on legislation to address "catastrophic risks" from AI, while partly echoing Trump's framing: "if there are gonna be killer robots, I'd rather they be American killer robots than Chinese killer robots." Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis posted on X $TWTR 0.00% that he found it alarming that "there is even a possibility that these technologies would elude human control."

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar put forward the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, a measure that would halt advanced AI development pending the creation of federal safety standards. Rep. Jay Obernolte and Rep. Lori Trahan announced plans for the FRONTIER Act, legislation intended to set rules for how advanced AI models can be deployed.

Obama and the Dems are suspiciously sounding the ‘AI apocalypse’ alarm — just in time for the midterms

By Miranda Devine, NY Post

Published Sep. 13, 2026

The “AI Apocalypse” scare campaign looks suspiciously like the climate hoax. How convenient that it’s come to a head right as the midterm election season kicks off this week.

The campaign launch was when Jacob Coxon, a low-level 27-year-old AI researcher, trumpeted his resignation from AI company Anthropic in a Wall Street Journal exclusive last week followed by a viral X thread warning AI will “kill us all.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade . . . They are gambling with our lives,” he claimed.

His boss, the Democrat-aligned Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei, amplified Coxon’s apocalyptic message with a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, followed by a giddy interview CBS aired Sunday in which he essentially called for a one-world government to regulate AI.

He wants “the right combination of governments” to provide “some kind of joint governance [to] control the technology.

“I’m uncomfortable government didn’t build this technology.”

Bernie Sanders, who announced the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act” this month with dark warnings about the existential threat, joined him on the airwaves Sunday: “We don’t have months. We don’t have years. We got to move now.”

‘O,’ of course

Anthropic’s intervention caps a summer in which a top Democrat talking point, parroted by candidates across the country, has been the perils of AI data centers. It’s a topic that, seemingly out of nowhere, now polls as a significant issue for voters, probably helped by a Chinese social media influence campaign discovered by X to stir up hostility against data centers.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the G20 this month that America would have 80 percent of the world’s computing power by 2028, so it stands to reason China wants to slow us down.

No wonder David Sacks, chairman of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, suggests the latest Anthropic doom-fest is an “election season psy-op.”

Of course Barack Obama is involved. The former president and back-room Machiavelli “has taken a special interest in AI in recent years, and has offered himself as a sounding board to industry leaders, including [Open AI’s Sam] Altman and Mr. Amodei,” says The New York Times.

During a closed-door midterm fundraiser in Manhattan on Thursday with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Obama urged party donors and Democrat House members to make AI regulation the center of their agenda. He told them AI was even more “dangerous,” than nukes.

“You don’t need a bunch of highly enriched uranium” to build powerful AI, he said according to a transcript provided to the Times.

Obama’s sly argument that AI Armageddon is way worse than a nuclear apocalypse may successfully blunt Donald Trump’s argument that he’s intervening in Iran to stop the regime developing nukes.

The uncanny coordination of messages sure smells like an “election season psyop” designed to scare the electorate into voting Democrat. All that’s needed is an anti-AI Greta Thunberg.

The top four stories on the Times homepage over the weekend were Anthropic’s AI alarmism, plus a cover story of Sunday’s print edition.

It’s the same media game we’ve seen time and again, with the same deep-state bad actors who were behind the anti-Trump dirty tricks from the Russia hoax to the Dirty 51 letter that falsely claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

For one thing, its supposedly “bipartisan” National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council is stacked with former Biden and Obama intelligence officials who are closely connected to anti-Trump hoaxers like former CIA director John Brennan and Michael Morell, the former acting CIA chief who coordinated the Dirty 51 letter before the 2020 election at the behest of Anthony Blinken, Biden’s future secretary of state.

One Anthropic council member is David Cohen, who was CIA Deputy Director under Brennan and involved in cooking up the bogus Intelligence Community Assessment commissioned by Obama in December 2016 that used the debunked Steele Dossier to claim Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. Cohen was also Biden’s CIA deputy director and signed a public letter with Morell supporting Brennan after Trump revoked his security clearance. Cohen was an early member of Blinken’s consultancy WestExec Advisors and co-authored a 2020 Foreign Policy article on the “politicization of intelligence” with Morell.

Another member of Anthropic’s council is Christopher Fonzone, Obama’s Deputy White House Counsel, and NSC legal adviser who later served as Office of the Director of National Intelligence General Counsel under Biden.

Another Anthropic council member is Richard Fontaine, who succeeded Victoria Nuland as CEO of DC think tank the Center for a New American Security, where Cohen was a senior fellow.

Chuck Schumer’s former national-security adviser Mike Kuiken is yet another council member.

Anthropic is like Pfizer before the 2020 election, when it delayed announcing the COVID jab: a captured industry leader pressed into service by Democrats before a crucial election.

Vance must push back

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismisses AI fear-mongering as “complete nonsense.” He told a Goldman Sachs conference Thursday that the latest Anthropic scare is just a ruse for the industry to gin up business for new cybersecurity products.

“What better way to create demand than to create a problem?”

In any case, as Sacks tweeted Saturday, nothing is stopping Amodei and Altman from policing the AI frontier themselves.

“You guys are the frontier. [You] have a duopoly on frontier intelligence . . . Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability . . . Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic . . .

“The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it . . .

“If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.”

It sure looks that way. But history shows that even the most transparent hoax can succeed in the short term.

The AI fear campaign could mean the difference for Republicans at the midterms if they aren’t careful. It also helps Dems toxify the Republican spending advantage by tying it to AI — Elon Musk is reportedly dumping a big bucket of cash in Michigan to stop Abdul El-Sayed, for instance.

The administration needs to nip this in the bud, and JD Vance should be leading the charge. With his Silicon Valley background, gift of the gab and pet reporters at the Times, he’s in an ideal position to grab hold of the narrative and bend it toward reality. After all, his own political prospects will suffer if Trump is rebuked this November.