Trump rejects AI's "effective altruism" movement

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Meghan McCarty Carino (1:01)

Trump has a new enemy of the week, AI. Doomers. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Meghan McCarty Carino.

It's Friday, which means it's time for Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review. Congress is looking to rein in flock cameras, and Apple has a new way to prove your iPhone photos are real. But first, it has been a wild week in AI.

After the freak out over an anthropic research or quitting in protest last week, CEO Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in AI and his counterparts Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed. President Trump? Not so much. He called fears of rogue AI a hoax and even went after a niche intellectual community that's deeply invested in AI safety, the effective altruist movement. Paresh Dave is here to help us unpack all that. He's a senior writer at Wired.

Paresh Dave (2:06)

Right now, in the AI policy debate, Trump has found effective altruists and what he calls do-mers, these very concerning do-mers who just don't get it or that are against progress has the problem. And, you know, that's just how Trump operates. I feel like the takeaway is that the concerns have certainly gone mainstream.

You know, there's a new poll out just this week that, you know, Democrats are even more concerned about AI than Republicans. This is definitely a bipartisan issue, but no one knows what to do about it. And you have companies that say they want regulation. You have other companies that are saying we kind of want regulation, but not your regulation. And amid all that lobbying, nothing is getting done.

Meghan McCarty Carino (2:52)

At one point, the president even called into Jensen Wong's cell phone, the CEO of NVIDIA, who was on stage at this kind of tech summit with the All-in podcast. And, you know, Jensen Wong is sort of lined up on the other side of things with the president as well, kind of poo-pooing these spheres. It just feels like tech is very publicly splitting into these warring factions, these divisions that have kind of been, you know, simmering under their surface, and they just like escaped containment into public view now.

And, you know, it's like there's a strange coalition of different partners and different warring coalitions.

Paresh Dave (3:34)

Well, that Trump call was funny because it came a couple of weeks after my colleague and I reported that a call from Trump had interrupted a company-wide meeting at NVIDIA, and Jensen took it in the middle of that meeting. So maybe this was slightly staged, who knows.

But I think, yes, there are serious concerns here, right? If the kind of regulations that an OpenAI or Anthropic might want, or Google especially might want come into place, they could entrench the dominance of those companies and their serious competition concerns about that. Meta and NVIDIA are really champions of the open source movement that you've talked about on this show. And they want to make sure that they and their communities and their development communities are not squeezed by regulations that put really onerous burdens on operations that can't handle it. So there are these meaningful debates that deserve to be happening, but they just don't seem to be happening in a way that's productive.

Meghan McCarty Carino (4:38)

All right. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders held this conference this week to talk about AI safety with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Here is a clip from the pro-human assembly.

SPEAKER_1 (4:50)

We're trying to raise above partisanship, and we have to.

Steve Bannon (4:54)

This is a hinge in history. And the people of this country must make the decisions about AI and not just a handful of oligarchs.

Meghan McCarty Carino (5:06)