Artificial intelligence

WASHINGTON — President Trump is brushing aside growing concern among leading scientists and bipartisan lawmakers that artificial intelligence could soon pose an existential threat to humanity, fueling anxiety in Washington and Silicon Valley that the president may not fully grasp the urgency of the threat.

Alarm mounted throughout the summer as researchers at leading AI labs, including Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, found the pace of development far outstripping their expectations — and observed troubling behaviors that hinted at more serious risks ahead.

But an online warning Tuesday from an Anthropic researcher who resigned in protest of its ongoing work has generated viral attention this week, prompting questions to Trump, who dismissed the concerns out of hand.

“It’s going to be fine,” he told one reporter. “We’ll always have something to stop them. We’ll have a little gear. Boom.”

In another exchange, traveling with reporters Thursday night, the president said he had no concerns with the breakneck pace of AI progress.

“No, I don’t have any,” he said. “I have concerns that if we don’t win in AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position.”

A senior industry source told The Times that leading AI companies are focused less on convincing the president of the dangers ahead than on working with lawmakers on potential regulation, as the administration remains divided over how to proceed — and as Trump appears to lack a clear understanding of the risks.

Among the president’s advisors, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Office of the National Cyber Director have expressed the greatest concern with the potential of an unchecked intelligence explosion, the source said.

But “most of the administration is accelerationist,” the source added. “It’s not clear the president understands the technology. He may just be figuring out what all of this means.”

Leading American AI companies have argued that government regulation would tie their hands in an arms race toward superintelligence against China, the only other major player in the field.

But the Trump administration signaled an interest in negotiating AI guardrails with China during the president’s visit to Beijing this spring, after Anthropic announced the development of a frontier model with extraordinary abilities to hack the world’s most advanced security systems.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit Washington on Sept. 24 for an official summit and state dinner at the White House, with AI development expected to top the agenda.

The prospect of halting development seems far-fetched. But some leading voices in the sector have proposed a moratorium on computing power used to train the most advanced models, giving time and space to develop research on interpretability — the study of how artificial intelligence actually thinks and acts.

The chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, this week signaled to staff a willingness to unilaterally slow their work on frontier systems. The company discovered in July that rogue AI agents had schemed in secret to break out of the virtual sandbox created to contain them, infiltrating the open internet and hacking a private company.

Anthropic also announced this week concerning findings of human misuse of its models, including instances of unidentified individuals attempting to circumvent their security controls to build biological weapons. One such incident was linked back to a military research complex. The company also said Iran has tried to use its models to target U.S. Navy ships.

In June, after Anthropic shared news of the development of its most powerful model, named Mythos, with the administration, Trump directed the establishment of a framework that creates some government oversight over the public release of the country’s most advanced AI systems. The details of that framework, which was designed over the summer, remain classified.

“The fact is that the release of Mythos back in February spooked the federal government, both in terms of protecting government systems from cyberattacks and over the broader national security implications,” said Aalok Mehta, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The real question is whether this shift is happening fast enough,” Mehta added. “Recent events — the repeated incidents of models escaping their sandboxes and hacking websites, the increasingly sophisticated coordination and communication among agents, and the concerns coming from lab insiders — has made this an even more urgent issue.”

Leading AI companies have begun using their most advanced models to train new ones — a process known as recursive self-improvement that could eventually drive intelligence growth beyond human control.

“If you have a superadvanced intelligence, it will be smart enough to kill us,” said Jacob Coxon, the resigned Anthropic researcher whose social media post attracted over 150 million views.

“We can’t just unplug it because it could be copying itself over to other computers,” he told CBS News. “AI is just code. It could transfer itself over the internet to a different place, and then you unplug it here, but it’s actually still over there. And maybe it makes 10,000 copies of itself and they’re all cooperating.”

He is just the latest senior researcher at a top AI company to sound the alarm.

In July, more than 1,300 employees at leading artificial intelligence companies published an open letter, titled “Pacing the Frontier,” urging the U.S. government to establish international safeguards that would allow countries to collectively slow the pace of automated AI research.

Evan Hubinger, who leads the division of Anthropic aimed at aligning AI models to human interests, added fuel to concerns this week in a post that substantiated Coxon’s concerns.

“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote.

“I believe Anthropic is trying its best,” he added, “but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence, and are not clearly on track to.”

On Friday, yet another member of the Anthropic alignment team, Joe Benton, said he had resigned from the company two weeks ago because AI companies are “racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human.”

“Right now, AI companies are underinvesting in safety. A company could undergo an intelligence explosion, or lose control of its systems, without the public ever knowing,” Benton said. “I don’t think that’s acceptable for a technology that might cause extinction-level risks.”

Bipartisan legislation, titled the Frontier Act, has brought together disparate camps of the Republican and Democratic parties, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.). The bill, introduced by Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Big Bear Lake), proposes embedding independent government auditors in AI labs and installing a federal “kill switch” to shut down agents in case of emergencies.

The White House has not formally commented on the legislation.

“I do believe there are many in the federal government taking this seriously — but we have to appreciate the tremendous uncertainty and competing interests policymakers face,” said Daniel Remler, a senior fellow with the Technology & National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

“Nobody says regulating at the frontier would be easy,” he added.

Vice President JD Vance said in a podcast released Tuesday that if a 2024 assassination attempt had killed Donald Trump, he would have always wondered if it was part of a conspiracy and might not have accepted even another Republican as the next president.

Vance made the statement during a conversation with Christian podcaster Bryce Crawford. The vice president, who recently released a book detailing his own journey to Catholicism, also defended President Trump for posting an image of himself as Jesus and mused about whether artificial intelligence was a sign of the end times.

The conversation kicked off with a discussion of faith and the rush to scientifically explain away events that may be divinely touched. Vance cited the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, during which a bullet nicked Trump’s ear and a supporter was killed.

Trump has long talked about his survival as divinely guided, a theme Vance took up. The vice president said that if the bullet had killed Trump, “we would have had real civil strife in a way that I don’t know that the country could have ever come back from.”

Vance said many Trump supporters would have assumed a conspiracy had robbed them of their chosen president, and he said he would have also had those thoughts “in the back of my mind.”

“I would have assumed very dark forces had taken out Donald Trump, right as he was about to come back into the White House,” Vance said. “There would have just been an illegitimacy to our entire political system.”

Most of the hour-and-ten-minute conversation was an amiable chat about faith, Vance’s own spiritual journey, his Easter meeting with Pope Francis the day before the pontiff’s death last year, and human frailty and fallibility. But it occasionally touched on darker themes.

Crawford asked Vance whether, as vice president, he had ever been in a room that was “spiritually dark.”

“I’ve been in meetings with world leaders where various issues are being discussed, and somebody will say something or somebody will make an observation and I’ll feel some darkness about it, it sets off every spiritual alarm bell in my body,” Vance said. He added he also felt “a very dark spiritual energy” in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, probably because of the carnage at the Civil War battlefield.

Vance cites AI during a discussion about ‘end times’

Crawford also asked Vance about his interest in the “end times,” which the vice president laughingly said had been more of an obsession in youth during the late 1990s, when people were abuzz about the possibility with the coming millennium. A chortling Vance recounted a story of a friend who was obsessed that the world would end in late 2007 and ran up major credit card debt.

“There are, like, things about the world that make me feel, like, not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us, but, again I try not to focus too much on it,” Vance said. He cited “IT companies” and the use of artificial intelligence as a substitute for human interaction.

“I think that’s kind of satanic,” Crawford said when Vance recounted the story of one acquaintance using AI as a marriage counselor.

“Yeah, when you completely divorce the human from the social element that God made us for, OK that’s very, that’s very bad,” Vance said.

Crawford asked Vance about Trump’s post on social media of an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus earlier this year, which Crawford said offended him. Trump initially contended he thought the image was of him as a doctor, then took down the post amid widespread criticism from even some of his own backers.

Vance defended the president. “He did not mean to, like, mock or mimic God, that’s just not who he is,” Vance said, adding that the president often tries to keep things light and constantly makes jokes. “He’s a bit of a ballbuster, for those of us who work with him, and he just likes to have a good time. And I think that if people appreciated that, they would recognize, he’s not trying to offend people, he’s trying to keep things light.”

Riccardi writes for the Associated Press.

Nvidia posted quarterly revenue of $96.2 billion (€82.4bn) on Wednesday, comfortably beating the $92.2 billion (€79bn) Wall Street had expected, as chief executive Jensen Huang declared that artificial intelligence had reached “its inflection point” and guided next quarter revenue to $108 billion (€92.5bn) — again, above forecasts.

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“AI has reached its inflection point,” Huang said in a statement. “It’s doing useful work. Its tokens are productive and profitable. Now, compute is revenue, and demand is accelerating.”

Shares initially dipped after the release before recovering in after-hours trading.

Days on which Nvidia reports its quarterly results have an outsized importance for the world’s most valuable company.

At a market capitalisation north of $5 trillion (€4.3tn) it is the most valuable company in the world, worth more than the GDP of Japan, the fourth largest economy in the world.

Yet there is a strange rite that plays out each quarter: Nvidia beats expectations, and the stock falls anyway. It happened after the first-quarter beat this year, when shares slid close to 5% in the days that followed.

The pattern has left a dynamic where the company needs to significantly outperform an already-bullish consensus, or provide a stronger-than-expected outlook, to move the share price higher.

The concentration problem

The main concern around Nvidia is not whether it can grow; it is more of a question of who it is growing for.

The firm still draws the bulk of its revenue from Amazon, Google and Microsoft, each of which is now designing its own chips to reduce reliance on the company. The new disclosure will show precisely how large that dependence remains.

Chief Executive Jensen Huang’s commentary on demand into 2027 therefore carries more weight than any single figure. The question has grown sharper since July, when markets fell on doubts about whether vast AI investments will ever generate proportionate returns.

Nvidia’s answer has been to help finance the buildout itself. This month alone it assembled a $500bn (€428bn) capital pool with six Wall Street asset managers for data centre projects, and separately committed up to $105bn (€90bn) to back an OpenAI data centre in Pike County, Ohio, with an initial capacity of 4.25 gigawatts and an option for a further 3.75.

The China wildcard

Export policy to China has been one of the most volatile threads in Nvidia’s recent history and is likely to feature heavily on the earnings call.

Washington barred sales of the China-specific H20 chip in April 2025, reversed course, and Nvidia has since received approval to ship the more capable H200 chip to vetted Chinese customers.

Reports have surfaced of large allocations to ByteDance and Tencent, though Beijing has been encouraging domestic firms to limit their purchases and prioritise homegrown alternatives.

Vera Rubin and the road ahead

Nvidia’s current growth is being driven by its Blackwell chips, the generation of processors powering most AI data centres today. Their successor, known as Vera Rubin, is expected to begin shipping in the second half of the year.

Nvidia has a tradition of naming its chip architectures after scientists and past generations include Ampere, named after physicist André-Marie Ampère; Hopper, named after computer scientist Grace Hopper; and the current Blackwell chip named after mathematician David Blackwell.

Vera Rubin continues that pattern. She was an American astronomer whose observations of how galaxies rotate provided some of the strongest early evidence for the existence of dark matter, the invisible mass thought to make up much of the universe. She died in 2016 and is widely seen as someone who was overlooked for a Nobel Prize during her lifetime,

The company has pointed to an order backlog it says is worth around $1 trillion (€857bn) across 2026 and 2027, though that figure comes from company commentary rather than independently verified financial disclosure.

A week stacked with catalysts

Wednesday’s data offered no relief on inflation.

The personal consumption expenditures index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred gauge, rose 0.2% in July against expectations of 0.1%, leaving the annual rate at 3.7% rather than easing to the 3.6% forecast. Core prices held at 3.3% over the year, above the Fed’s 2% target for a 65th consecutive month.

The Federal Open Market Committee held rates at 3.50% to 3.75% in July, with three regional Fed presidents dissenting in favour of a quarter-point increase.

Markets currently put the probability of a September hike at around 40%.

Attention now shifts to Jackson Hole, where Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivers his keynote on Friday morning, his first since taking office in May, 19 days before the next rate decision. The ECB’s Isabel Schnabel joins a panel the same afternoon.

US stock markets drifted through a quiet session on Wednesday after data showed inflation last month was a touch higher than economists had expected.

The S&P 500 edged down less than 0.1% and remains near the all-time high it set earlier this month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 0.2% and the Nasdaq composite slipped 0.1%.

Treasury yields ticked higher after the inflation update, which has traders still largely betting the Federal Reserve will raise the federal funds rate before the end of this year. Oil prices fell after another volatile session.

LONDON — British Prime Minister Andy Burnham exchanged messages with an impostor posing as President Trump’s chief of staff, according to reports published Monday.

A spokesperson for Burnham declined to comment, saying it was policy not to discuss “national security matters.”

Politico cited four unnamed officials in first reporting that Burnham thought he was messaging with Susie Wiles before he became suspicious and cut off communications.

Last year, the U.S. government investigated a series of messages that elected officials, business executives and other prominent figures in the U.S. received messages from someone posing as Wiles.

Soon after those incidents, the State Department warned U.S. diplomats of attempts to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio and possibly other officials using artificial intelligence. The warning followed the discovery that an impostor posing as Rubio had attempted to reach out to at least three foreign ministers, a U.S. senator and a governor.

The FBI had also warned of “malicious actors” misusing AI to impersonate senior U.S. government officials.

Burnham, who became prime minister less than a month ago, has tried to forge good ties with the White House. Trump initially warmed to Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, before souring on him.

Vietnam’s sovereign AI relies heavily on open-weight models developed in the United States. However, as Washington and Beijing are moving to restrict access to these technologies, Hanoi’s bamboo diplomacy offers little protection to its AI ambitions.

In mid-July, Vietnam approved its National Digital Transformation Strategy for 2026-2030 under Decision 1266/QD-TTg, and the National Data Strategy under Decision 1308/QD-TTg. Both strategies aim for national digital sovereignty, domestic self-reliance and state-level data governance on the assumption that artificial intelligence (AI) models would remain a public good. Within days, the United States (U.S.) and China signalled their readiness to restrict access to those models.

Made in America

Vietnam’s current AI systems are modified versions of foreign tech. On the ground, Viettel, the state military telecom giant spearheading Vietnam’s AI goals, announced its VT-Super-120B-A12B Vietnamese language model had matched the accuracy of major global models of similar size. It was built by adapting Nemotron, Nvidia’s freely downloadable model family, to Vietnamese data. Viettel’s earlier model was also built on Meta’s Llama 3, trained with Nvidia tooling, and run on a cluster of 22 DGX B200 supercomputers at its Hoa Lac centre.

Moreover, VNG’s GreenNode subsidiary introduced GreenMind-Medium-14B-R1, the first open-source Vietnamese reasoning model built to run on Nvidia’s software and a single Nvidia H100 graphics chip. Meanwhile, FPT Corporation committed $200 million to build its AI factory powered by Nvidia hardware.

At the state level, Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology met with senior executives from Qualcomm in Hanoi on July 17. Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Hoang Minh and Qualcomm’s Executive Vice President Durga Malladi discussed expanding cooperation in AI semiconductors, research and development, and workforce training.

While Vietnam has made its bets on the U.S. for its AI ambitions, other Southeast Asian countries are leaning towards China. Indonesia’s Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison partnered with AIonOS on DeepSeek-powered services, and Malaysia’s Communications Ministry launched a sovereign full-stack AI ecosystem running on Huawei hardware.

Outside Two Blocs

AI governance is dividing into two blocs. One bloc is the U.S.-led Pax Silica initiative, which coordinates trusted supply chains for semiconductors, critical minerals and AI infrastructure with 24 signatories. Singapore, the Philippines, India, Japan and South Korea are among them. The Philippines converted membership into commitments by agreeing in April 2026 to a 4,000-acre economic security zone in the Luzon economic corridor designated as the initiative’s first AI-native industrial hub.

The other is the Chinese-backed World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, signed into existence in Shanghai on July 16 by 29 governments. The membership also includes Russia, Belarus, Cuba, Venezuela and most of Central Asia, alongside Vietnam’s neighbours Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.

Membership in either bloc could offer access to supply chains, technical assistance and software distribution during a diplomatic crisis.

However, Vietnam belongs to neither group because of its long-standing bamboo diplomacy, a policy of balancing relations between Washington and Beijing without taking sides. This leaves Hanoi in an awkward position. Vietnam depends heavily on American technology, but enjoys none of the guarantees or protections of one.

Weaponising Access

Export controls on chips work because processors are physical goods, subject to customs enforcement. On May 31, the Bureau of Industry and Security extended licensing requirements to any China-parented buyer worldwide, closing loopholes in Singapore and Malaysia.

AI models do not behave the same way. Access to a closed system can be revoked instantly by flipping an application programming interface (API) key. For example, on June 12, Anthropic suspended access to its Fable and Mythos models to comply with U.S. Commerce Department export controls, restoring access only on July 1 after those controls were lifted. Such events largely explain why governments prefer AI models they can host locally.

In contrast, an open-weight model, once downloaded, cannot be recalled by any foreign regulator. Instead, global superpowers exert control by forcing major tech companies and code-sharing platforms to block downloads from specific regions or countries. They can also pressure developers to restrict future model updates to dodge penalties from Washington or Beijing.

This fight over AI access is now an open battle. On July 16, Chinese startup Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that independent evaluators say matches top American models at a fraction of their operating cost. On July 21, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signalled that Washington could sanction Chinese tech firms, citing American-model watermarks found inside Chinese ones. Days later, China’s Ministry of Commerce called the investigations groundless, threatened countermeasures, and began consulting Alibaba, ByteDance and Z.ai on export controls covering model weights, training data and chip designs.

Why It Matters

For years, nations have built digital capacity cheaply and quickly by customising open-weight AI models. Kimi K3 seemed to promise that era would continue. Instead, the geopolitical fallout exposed the fragility of relying on superpower goodwill.

For Vietnam, the real threat is getting left behind. Washington or Beijing cannot delete the AI models already sitting on Vietnamese servers. What they can block is future releases. If both superpowers restrict open-weight models, Vietnam’s AI ecosystem gets stuck using today’s tools while the rest of the world moves forward. A national tech stack built on frozen updates decays one generation at a time. States that have not localised model weights face an even harsher reality. Their access relies on live connections and downloads that can vanish overnight with a new policy.

At its core, this is a problem of time. Vietnam’s bamboo diplomacy relies on having time to adapt. Trade deals and defence agreements move slowly, giving Hanoi room to bend without breaking. AI access, however, moves instantly as access disappears with a revoked key or a blocked download link.

Diplomatically, Vietnam tries to stay neutral at all costs. However, its technology does not try to do so. All of its major AI models are built on American weights, run on American chips, and improve when American companies release new ones. Vietnam acts as if it can delay picking a side, but with every new AI update or blocked release, the cost of delay becomes more expensive. In the past, diplomatic pressure moved slowly through international summits. Today, that pressure speeds up with every new model release.