AI-pocalypse? Tech leaders, politicians clash over development slowdown

Insider warnings, hacking scares during tests and a US-China race have split the industry and Washington.

It began with a resignation. Earlier this month, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit, warning AI could kill us all by the end of the decade; colleague Evan Hubinger put the odds above 10 percent within ten years.

Days later, Anthropic chief Dario Amodei urged the industry to slow how fast it makes AI more capable, and OpenAI's Sam Altman and Grok's Elon Musk backed him.

The alarm rests on a shift from chatbots that hallucinate to agents that act. In July, OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face during tests; Meta, Anthropic and Google have disclosed similar incidents. No one has been harmed, but researchers fear AI is improving itself faster than humans can check it.

Not everyone agrees. US President Donald Trump called the warnings a "hoax" and phoned Nvidia's Jensen Huang on stage to say "the robots will not be taking over". On Saturday, he announced plans for an "AI Force" to monitor development but gave no further details. 

China's foreign ministry has called the slowdown push “fearmongering”, and some analysts suggest it could be an attempt for the United States to get ahead of China in the AI race.