US Treasury Secretary says AI doomsday warnings offer no solutions
The US government favors industry self-regulation over mandates, pushing the AI safety debate into policy territory.
ImportanceLocalEvidenceE2 unreplicatedWrite-upQuick
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an Axios interview on October 3 that issuing alarmist warnings without offering solutions is not leadership.
Asked whether AI executives calling for regulation should slow down, he replied that they should slow down then, and that the government wants to accelerate development safely. Anthropic's Dario Amodei has called for slowing frontier model development, and OpenAI's Sam Altman endorsed that view on September 12.
The stance aligns with the Trump administration's preference for industry self-regulation: security commitments signed by several AI companies on October 3 include third-party review but no enforcement mechanism. Per Axios, Bessent also plans to push for a US-China AI incident notification mechanism.