Former President Barack Obama used a Friday appearance at Colgate University in upstate New York to argue that artificial intelligence needs firm government oversight, putting him at odds with President Donald Trump’s more market-driven stance on the technology.
Speaking with Colgate president Brian Casey before a packed auditorium of students, Obama described AI as a powerful tool that carries real risk if left unchecked. “The good news is, is that AI is a tool,” he said. “It’s a machine. It’s built to give you the illusion that it’s not, but it is. It’s a really sophisticated, remarkable technology, but it should be thought of as a tool, which means we have choices in terms of how we use this.”
He said AI could help “vastly accelerate our ability to rid the world of cancer” or “come up with a safe formula for nuclear fusion” for zero-carbon energy, but warned that mishandling the technology “could be chaotic and potentially catastrophic.”
Obama said he welcomed recent moves by leading AI companies to slow development voluntarily. “My view this week has been it is good that some of the leading companies have said we need to slow this down, and we should encourage that,” he said. “There have been some on the left who’ve said we shouldn’t allow them to make that decision. I agree that that can’t be a long-term solution. Government has to be regulating this.”
The remarks come amid growing unease inside the AI industry itself. OpenAI disclosed last Wednesday that it had identified six new instances of “unexpected or concerning model behavior” over the previous six months. Days later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman endorsed a call from rival Anthropic to slow the pace of AI development.
In a Saturday essay, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed a three-step plan he said governments should require frontier AI companies to follow. “To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” Amodei wrote. He said Anthropic has already committed unilaterally to the plan’s first step — giving outside experts employee-level access to evaluate the safety of its systems — and argued a coordinated pacing strategy would not require “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”
The essay followed the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who said he was leaving over concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives” and that people building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger backed him publicly, writing on X, “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.” Elon Musk also endorsed Amodei’s call for a slowdown.
Obama Takes Aim at Trump Directly
At Colgate, Obama criticized the administration’s approach by name, recounting an argument he said he’d heard from a Trump adviser on AI policy.
I heard one of Donald Trump’s main advisers on this make the argument that the market will take care of it. These companies will solve the safety issues because they have every incentive to do so. If it turns out to be dangerous, people will just sue them. And they’re worried about financial liability. That’s not how we treat airlines, or drug companies, or food companies. We now have 150 years of experience just letting the market do whatever it wants when it comes to things that deeply affect our health and our safety. And so there’s no replacement for an effective government regulatory structure. And the challenge we have is that obviously, we have a president currently that has said that’s for losers. So, we’ve got a gap, at least of a couple of years, where things are moving really fast, and we have an administration that is not capable of or willing to, I would argue both, of putting together a serious regulatory framework, which is why I actually think we should be encouraging some sort of voluntary industry restraint, not because it’s a replacement, but because that’s probably the best we can do for now until we can get Congress and the White House to start getting serious about this.
Trump announced Saturday that he plans to launch an “AI Force” and appoint a “czar” to oversee it, though he offered few details on its structure or mission. On Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social that the Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies “will rein things in if we have to” when it comes to AI.
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