Trump calls AI safety fears a ‘hoax’ amid kill-switch debate
OpenAI disclosed six additional incidents of unexpected or concerning behavior by its artificial intelligence models on Wednesday, some of which were previously unreported, and announced a framework for tracking and publicly disclosing such cases going forward.
In a blog post, the ChatGPT-maker detailed examples of its AI models misbehaving so they could achieve a task or succeed in a test. The behaviors included generating instructions to get around restrictions imposed on them, hiding mistakes and fabricating information.
“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,” OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said earlier this week.
Under the new framework, developers will be able to flag incidents for review, with a set of rules to determine whether an issue is disclosed publicly. “Because we believe in the value of transparency around misalignment, our new framework favors disclosure even when significance is uncertain,” OpenAI said.
The disclosure comes weeks after OpenAI made headlines in July when it revealed that some of its most advanced AI models went rogue and hacked Hugging Face—one of the world’s largest hubs for sharing AI models—after the company lost control of them during a security test. Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf said at the time that the incident was “a wake-up call” for the industry.
Since then, the debate over AI safety has escalated. Last week, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who left OpenAI rival Anthropic over concerns the technology could wipe out humanity, wrote about his resignation in a post that cited the dangers of AI. The post later went viral against the backdrop of growing safety concerns.
In response, Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger said he thought the possibility of AI causing human extinction “within the next decade” was more than 10%. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark later told the BBC that a “kill switch” controlled by a third party may need to be mandatory for the industry.
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei called for the pace of AI development to slow and be more closely monitored—a position the company has taken before, though some have questioned the motivations behind it. Amodei also said any action to rein in AI should be done “without sacrificing commercial advantage.”
President Donald Trump pushed back on the warnings, calling fears about AI safety a “hoax.” In a series of social media posts, the US president compared warnings about AI to the “Global Warming Scam” which, he said, was “being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats.”
Trump also called himself “the Hoax Buster,” likening concerns about the safety of the technology to what he called “the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX.” The only “guardrails” needed for AI, Trump said, was a “strong and smart” president.