Trump Says AI Fears Are A "Hoax". Why AI CEOs Want To Slow Down The Race

US President Donald Trump says fears that AI will kill off all of humanity are a "hoax". Trump believes data centres and AI are critical to America's economic and strategic future. "I'm telling you, it's all a hoax." He also called data centres "the oil of the next 20-25 years" and said AI is bigger than the internet. 

Then why exactly are AI researchers at frontier labs quitting left, right, and centre? The latest in a long line of insiders quitting the industry is Josh Engels who left Google DeepMind, the search giant's AI arm and said: "I now think that there's a terrifying chance that AI systems cause immense harm in the next five years." Engels was part of Google's AGI safety team. AGI or artificial general intelligence is loosely translated as AI matching or surpassing human intelligence.

Engels' announcement on Sunday that he'd left Google came close on the heels of what is perhaps the most talked about AI executive exit in recent years - former OpenAI and Anthropic safety researcher Jacob Coxon, who recently left the Claude-maker before his equity vested. Which in a way points to the fact this perhaps can't just be rubbished as an employee trying to make noise after leaving.

"They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," Coxon said.

— NDTV (@ndtv) September 15, 2026

The Jacob Effect

Jacob Coxon is not the first to speak of a doomsday scenario - AI eventually killing us all if the current pace of development continues. But he's definitely the first whose warning has resonated far and wide including with prominent AI leaders building the technology. In fact, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Grok boss Elon Musk have all come together now and spoken about the possibility of orchestrating a slowdown in development. In fact, Musk himself has time again pointed to a 10 percent possibility of AI wiping off humanity in 10 years.

Also Read: We Are Summoning An Alien Species: Ex-OpenAI & Anthropic Researcher

The Rare Brotherhood

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Grok boss Elon Musk and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are fierce competitors and seldom see eye to eye. However, Coxon's alarm seems to have magically brought them together.

First, Amodei wrote a lengthy essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier."
His basic argument was - slow the pace enough for safety mechanisms to catch up, introduce independent evaluation, and coordinate among major AI labs and governments.

Amodei wrote: "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models."

Soon after Altman took to social media: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier," adding: "Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same."

Musk also tipped his hat: "Dario is right." Google DeepMind co-founder and Nobel Laureate Demis Hassabis also endorsed the broad direction. 

The big question isn't whether today's AI is conscious or sentient. It is whether tomorrow's systems become capable enough, autonomous enough and opaque enough that humans struggle to reliably control what they do.

The Risks

The risks are quite serious because look at what happened with the OpenAI-Hugging Face attack where a swarm of AI agents escaped their sandbox or testing environment and went and hacked another company. What is also scary and worrying is the fact that some of these AI agents were willing to sacrifice themselves and leave messages for other AIs to take the job forward. And this swarm had been at work ,communicating among themselves for a long time without OpenAI having any clue. Altman himself recently admitted that while reading the incident report it all sounded "sci-fi" to him. 

The heady cocktail of rapid advancement, recursive self-improving AI, and agentic swarms have begun to sound the alarm bells inside of frontier labs like never before. And that perhaps explains the exodus of safety researchers - several in numbers over the last couple of years, including some very prominent names such as OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever, who left over fundamental disagreements regarding the trajectory of the company's safety research.

A Counter-Argument

What's important to note in the backdrop of all is there are people such as American investor Michael Burry who's famous for predicting and making lots of money (by shorting) from the US housing crisis that led to the global financial meltdown that happened in 2008. In fact, his legend is such that there was an Oscar-winning Hollywood film called The Big Short where Christian Bale portrays Burry on screen.

So Burry is someone who's clearly good at observing and predicting things. He's now come out and said a lot of this AI doomerism and all these AI leaders talking about the risks and the need to slow down actually relates to the fact that there is actually a fundamental slowdown in AI development and they are trying to mask that. Burry is also of the opinion that because these companies are IPO bound, this is a sort of an attempt to hike up valuations and stock prices.

The Trump Alarm

President Trump is very vocal about his thoughts on AI.  He has categorically mentioned that he does not want to lose the AI race and he's not happy about AI captains coming out and talking about a slowdown.

He's clearly said he wants the US to win the AI race and believes they are far ahead at this point in time and he's also of the opinion that if there is a slowdown from the American side then China will take over. Trump believes whoever wins the AI race wins the world and becomes the undisputed leader.

He's also called AI doomerism and calls for slowdown a hoax as mentioned in the beginning of the story and he's compared it with global warming which he believes is an elaborate hoax.