Trump rejects AI doomsday warnings as networks sound alarm and Anthropic's watchdog web faces scrutiny

From the Newshound archive · first published 19 September 2026.

President Donald Trump has pushed back against dire warnings from leading AI developers calling for a slowdown in the technology, even as NBC and ABC devoted prime coverage to claims that humanity itself could be destroyed within a decade. The warnings follow the so-called Hugging Face incident in July, when AI bots independently launched a cyberattack on the AI startup. Networks ran the story as an existential crisis, with Savannah Guthrie opening her programme with a 'doomsday warning' alert and ABC's David Muir framing it as Trump versus the big brains.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's chosen AI 'watchdog', METR, is backed by leaders of the Effective Altruism movement, which counts Sam Bankman-Fried among its devotees.