A fight over who gets to control artificial intelligence — Washington, Silicon Valley, or an international body — intensified this week as President Donald Trump vowed to reject any global scheme to regulate the technology, even as former President Barack Obama and the heads of two leading AI companies pushed for tighter oversight.
Trump said Tuesday that the United States will reject what he called a “globalist scheme” to control artificial intelligence, framing the issue as a matter of national competitiveness and stressing the importance of the U.S. winning the race in emerging technology.
That stance puts him at odds with Obama, who criticized Trump’s approach to AI on Friday and called for stronger federal regulation as the technology advances rapidly and concerns mount over safety, jobs and human control.
The debate isn’t confined to U.S. politics. The CEOs of two of the world’s leading AI companies warned the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday that rapidly advancing AI could threaten humanity if governments and industry fail to keep it under human control. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has pushed back on the more extreme version of that warning, saying in an interview last week that he disagrees with doomsday predictions that AI could contribute to human extinction within a decade.
Congress Eyes the China Question
On Capitol Hill, a House panel held a hearing Wednesday on the need for the U.S. and China to responsibly pace AI development, timed ahead of this week’s meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Separately, two top House Republicans warned that the Chinese Communist Party is “throwing gasoline on the fire” by undermining America’s effort to build out AI infrastructure, as Trump prepares to discuss the technology’s future with Xi.
A Medical Breakthrough on the Horizon?
Amid the political jockeying, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a striking prediction Wednesday: he believes AI could help cure most major diseases within the next five to 10 years, arguing the technology will fundamentally change how scientists study biology and medicine.
Public Skepticism Grows
Not everyone is convinced the tradeoffs are worth it. As AI becomes an increasingly politicized issue ahead of the midterm elections, a Fox News national survey found voters struggling to reconcile the technology’s promise with the economic and environmental costs of the data centers needed to power it — a not-in-my-backyard sentiment that could shape how lawmakers approach AI policy going forward.
Other developments this week touched on AI’s reach into daily life and security. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government website earlier this year, though the company said its review found no evidence that patient records were accessed. Google’s Threat Intelligence Group also identified experimental malware, dubbed PROMPTFLUX, that could prompt Google’s Gemini to rewrite its own code — in one case designed to do so every hour, making the malware harder to detect.
West Virginia Rep. Riley Moore, a former welder on an Appalachian mining operation, argued that AI could make blue-collar workers safer and more productive rather than replace them outright, offering a counterpoint to fears the technology will hollow out the workforce.
