President Trump has dismissed fears that artificial intelligence could lead to mass extinction as a "HOAX," framing critics of data centers as wanting to "end up being backwards and poor." His stance stems from concerns that slowing the AI boom could trigger a market crash and recession, a view amplified by influential Silicon Valley figures like David Sacks, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen Huang, who warn of being overtaken by Chinese competitors. Despite Trump’s anti-regulatory push, internal White House debate is more nuanced, with growing caution over AI risks such as infrastructure hacks, biological threats, nuclear command vulnerabilities, job losses, and financial instability—risks once dismissed as "doomer" speculation. The issue is expected to come to a head this weekend as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent meets his Chinese counterpart in New York to shape the agenda for Trump’s upcoming visit with President Xi Jinping.

While officials hope for a U.S.-China working group on AI safety—possibly building on a Biden-era pact to ban AI in nuclear weapons decisions—expansive ideas like pre-release safety reviews of AI models are unlikely to be included. Trump opposes mandatory safety reviews for U.S. models, fearing they would push the market toward open-source Chinese alternatives that users could modify to remove safeguards. He plans to meet AI executives next week, though no schedule is confirmed, and figures like Dario Amodei of Anthropic—whose Pentagon-banned products and advocacy for industry self-pacing angered Trump—are unlikely to be invited.