(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump dismissed calls for an international agreement to put guardrails around the development of artificial intelligence, brushing off concerns about the dangers of frontier models going rogue.
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Despite warnings from the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, the leader of the UK, France and Canada, and even the leading AI labs, the US president said that his country's existing institutions will be able to mitigate any risks.
"The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence," Trump said in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. "I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution."
World leaders converged on New York for the UN's annual gathering at a moment of escalating anxiety about AI after researchers at the most advanced developers warned that the technology could wipe out humanity without proper controls.
In his final address to the UN assembly, Guterres called for international regulation to avert a dystopian future of rampant corporate power and deadly autonomous machines powered by AI.
"It is advancing at extraordinary speed and racing ahead of our ability to understand its full consequences," he said in the session's opening speech. "Killer robots must have no place in our future."
After a decade at the head of the UN, the 77-year-old set out a bleak vision of a world wracked by war and "weaponized" hunger, accelerating climate change and dwindling respect for human rights and the rule of law. He singled out AI and the data-center arms race as the defining power in a period of dramatic change and, in a nod to the US and China, called for guardrails to ensure the technology can be developed safely.
"Governments with the greatest AI capabilities have the greatest responsibilities to humanity to establish channels for dialogue, transparency, trust and cooperation," he said.
OpenAI, which opened the AI era with the release of ChatGPT in 2022, on Monday called for internationally agreed standards to ensure that AI can be developed safely.
Also on Monday, the UN's AI panel of experts released a report cautioning that increasingly capable models could escape human control and leaders from over 20 countries and the European Union called for mandatory safety testing of advanced AI models and potentially a new global institution to ensure humans retain control.