US President Donald Trump has announced that he will form an “AI Force” and appoint an artificial intelligence tsar amid warnings about the emergent technology.

In a social media post on Saturday, he said his administration “will not in any way hinder or stifle the growth” of the industry, and pushed back against calls to slow down the development of AI until better safeguards are put in place.

His post came as a slew of warnings about the potential dangers of AI have spurred calls for coordinated action on the technology’s development.

Trump offered no details or a timeline for his plan.

“AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country’s GDP,” he said on social media, adding that he wants the US to continue leading China in AI.

AI now sits at the heart of the US-China rivalry as the world’s two largest economies seek to gain an edge in advanced tech, and it is expected to be discussed when Trump meets President Xi Jinping next week.

Meanwhile, Trump said his administration would use the existing criminal and civil justice system to target any bad actors using the AI.

He also repeated comments that criticism and concerns around the potential dangers of AI are a “hoax”.

Claims by current and former researchers that the tech will endanger humanity – with one suggesting there is a greater than 10% chance of it “killing all humans” – have raised alarm bells in recent weeks.

Major AI companies have been racing to develop better systems, including creating what they call super intelligence – theoretical tech which is smarter than humans.

AI titans Anthropic, OpenAI and Google – the tech companies behind Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, respectively – have also disclosed instances of security breaches or incidents in which their chatbots were used for “malicious activity”.

Anthropic head Dario Amodei recently called for AI development to slow down and proposed industry-wide deceleration and regulation, as well as independent monitoring of AI model development.

Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI have both said they agree with his recommendations.

Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, told BBC that a “kill switch” that can be checked by a third party may need to be mandatory for the industry.

The warnings have prompted US lawmakers to propose legislation around the technology but Altman suggested this week that Washington has struggled to keep pace with the new tech and how to regulate it. He said people should have more faith in AI firms to keep it safe.

“The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this,” Altman told a conference in San Francisco.

In the UK, MPs across parties and peers have identified human rights risks posed by artificial intelligence and have argued that existing laws are ill-equipped to address the technology’s rapid growth.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) has published a report calling for a new bill on AI to “address the scale and seriousness” of such threats.

OpenAI boss Sam Altman thinks people should have more faith in his company and others like it to do the right thing when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) development amid rising public concerns about all the risks.

“The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this,” Altman said on Tuesday during a conference in San Francisco.

However, Altman noted that people were justified in their fears around AI, as the capability of the tools has progressed rapidly.

“It doesn’t take as much imagination as it used to for [us] to imagine how this could go wrong,” he said. “I think the world is right to be afraid of this.”

Altman’s comments came during an appearance at an annual conference hosted by software firm Salesforce.

It was the first time he had spoken publicly since a post went viral last week by a researcher who quit the AI firm Anthropic. The researcher claimed AI could kill all humans by the end of the decade if left unchecked.

A handful of other AI executives and experts responded by saying they agreed with the assessment, though they didn’t explain how they came to their conclusions or how exactly AI could accomplish such a thing.

The fervor over the claims has led to more scrutiny of AI development in recent days, and in response, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for the pace of all AI development to slow and urged governments to regulate the industry.

The post was applauded by Altman, as well as co-founder of Google’s DeepMind Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk, owner of social media site X and AI assistant Grok.

By Tuesday, more AI leaders were voicing support for self-regulation rather than government involvement.

Altman said that he felt AI companies like his own were capable of essentially regulating themselves.

“We will get it right, I’m very confident in our company’s and industry’s ability to do this safely,” Altman said, adding that he was sure that they would “keep alignment and safety way ahead of capabilities” and if they couldn’t, they would “slow down or stop”.

After Altman’s comments, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X that every AI lab has the ability and the incentive “to take its own actions” towards making AI tools and models that are designed for safety.

“Any lab that doesn’t focus on alignment will fall behind,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well.”

Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia, also said at the same Tuesday conference that the AI firms should decide if new versions of the technology should be released and not be managed by outside forces.

“We don’t need new laws or regulations,” Huang said, adding that there should not be a “false choice” between the speed of innovation and the safety of AI products.

Nvidia is the biggest company in the world by valuation, with its profits having boomed as a result of rampant demand for the AI computing chips it makes.

“Safety is paramount. However, safety is an engineering problem,” Huang said.

He added that if at any time a leader of an AI company lacks confidence in their product they should choose to not release it.

“That’s a very obvious thing to do,” Huang said. “Run as fast as you can, but if at any time you feel the institution is not in control, take a pause.”

Some industry figures have argued resurgent AI fears were overblown and were being jumped on to generate hype for the industry.

During the conference, Altman addressed a crowd of hundreds of business people, telling them they should use AI tools to aid in their work, but also needed them in order to protect their businesses from potentially AI-enabled cyber attacks.

The idea of AI executives being left to entirely regulate themselves has struck some in the industry as a bad idea.

Jack Clark, an Anthropic executive and co-founder, told the BBC on Monday that leaving AI to be a “totally unregulated industry” was “rolling dice with immense risks”.

Patrick Hillman, the chief operating officer of Logical Intelligence, which is chaired by Yann LeCun, a sage of the AI industry, noted Tuesday how little faith people have in tech companies to do anything truly in the public interest.

“The only institution that Americans might trust less than Washington these days is Silicon Valley. I have worked and lived in both and I assure you both have earned this scepticism,” Hillman said.

“If you believe what you are building is dangerous, show us what you are prepared to stop doing,” he added.

Leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic have said they have recently started working towards some sort of industry-wide agreement on safety.

Amodei, during a cameo at the conference on Tuesday, said Anthropic is now in “a dialogue with the rest of the industry” about committing to better safety standards and checks on AI tools and development.

He also said that one of the biggest surprises of the AI boom was not how the technology itself has advanced, but its broader impact.

“We didn’t appreciate that it would lead to companies growing so fast, and how quickly they would become central to things,” Amodei said.

OpenAI executive Chris Lehane said last week that the company was also working with other AI labs “to advance frontier AI standards, building a voluntary effort now, with or without government support.” Those labs include Anthropic and Google Deepmind.

“With stakes this high, we cannot let the perfect become the enemy of the good,” Lehane wrote.

US President Donald Trump has downplayed risks posed by artificial intelligence following days of dire warnings by experts.

“You have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” Trump said during a visit to Ireland.

One of the warnings came from a former Anthropic researcher who said “there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future” if the current pace of development continued.

On Saturday, top industry bosses agreed and called for a slow-down. Trump did not directly address the idea, but said: “We’re leading China on AI… and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”

Trump spoke on the same day AI researcher Jacob Coxon – who quit Anthropic a few days ago – told the BBC that staff who were developing the systems were “genuinely frightened” for the future of humanity.

Coxon – who has also worked at OpenAI – welcomed the idea of a slowdown but said it would need to be co-ordinated with China.

On Saturday, Elon Musk, owner of xAI, and Sam Altman of OpenAI, backed a warning from the head of Anthropic Dario Amodei that the pace of development should be slowed “to reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong”.

The Anthropic CEO said any slowdown would have to be limited to avoid allowing China to pull ahead.

The issues surrounding AI have prompted fierce debate – and present a dilemma for many world leaders.

On one hand, the sector is seen as a huge opportunity to boost economic growth and a way to improve outdated digital systems and ways of working.

But there have also been a number of incidents where AI appears to have gone seriously wrong.

In August, OpenAI said it had slowed down training some of its most advanced AI models to improve security.

The ChatGPT-maker said it was adding new measures after its AI agents bypassed safeguards and hacked the tech start-up Hugging Face.

And the same month it was disclosed two of the world’s most powerful AI tools created fake human profiles to try and trick people in attempted cyber-attacks.

The UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) said in the most serious case, Anthropic’s Mythos AI tried to gain access to a service by sending private messages, having set up fake accounts mimicking real people – then hid the evidence.

The Trump administration argues that the US must maintain global tech dominance as a matter of national security, though it has admitted a need for vigilance around the risks posed by the emerging technology.

The weekend call by major AI executives sparked discussion in Washington, where lawmakers are facing pressure to address those potential risks around rapid AI developments.

On Sunday, Speaker Mike Johnson, the top House Republican, urged caution about rushing AI regulation during an appearance on CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union, arguing it could “smother American innovation”.

“If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American,” he said. “So, we’ve got to have balance. We’ve got to have steady hands at the wheel.”

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued for “decisive action” by lawmakers.

He told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week that the US should slow down “the pace of development in order to protect the American people and ensure that AI is proceeding safely”.

Responding to recent comments from the AI industry, tech investor David Sacks, who serves on Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, called on the companies to police themselves.

“Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission,” he posted on X.

“So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it… Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.”

Still, there is at least some cross-party consensus on AI regulation. In July, a group of House Democrats and Republicans introduced the Frontier Act, a bipartisan bill that seeks to establish a national safety and oversight framework for AI.

“Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway,” Rep Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat who co-authored the bill, wrote on X this week.

“It’s past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job.”