AI 'doomers' risk kneecapping US vs China, but ex-Pentagon vet says both extremes miss the mark
"Doomer"-driven AI regulation could kneecap the U.S. against China while helping tech giants lock in their lead over smaller startups, a former Pentagon AI official who also worked for AI...
By Fox News · Fox News
"Doomer"-driven AI regulation could kneecap the U.S. against China while helping tech giants lock in their lead over smaller startups, a former Pentagon AI official who also worked for AI company Palantir Technologies told Fox News Digital. The warning follows the resignation of an Anthropic researcher who said increasingly powerful AI could threaten humanity, while President Donald Trump called fears of rogue AI a "hoax" and compared those advancing such warnings to climate-change alarmists whose predictions, he argued, haven't come true. "The notion that I think the president and I share is that we should let the race play out, that the risk of global extinction is not real, it is in fact a hoax," Will Thibeau, a former Palantir deployment strategist who later worked in the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office told Fox News Digital. TRUMP UNLOADS ON TECH TITANS PUSHING FOR SLOWDOWN ON EMERGING INDUSTRY: ‘WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!’ "The stakes of losing to China, of losing the opportunity to transform our economy, are so high that we shouldn't let 'doomerism' define public policy," the retired Army Ranger added. Thibeau’s position is not that Washington should take a hands-off approach to AI, but that the U.S. should race aggressively at the frontier while narrowly addressing concrete risks — threading the needle between denying China an advantage and preventing regulations backed by today’s leading AI firms from entrenching a "duopoly" at the expense of new American innovators. "We must maintain an edge at the frontier, so our economy has the license on the first benefits of artificial intelligence. Enhanced manufacturing capabilities, enhanced processing power, decision-making in financial markets," he said, disputing the idea that Beijing will not race full bore because the technology could countervail the CCP’s grip by incidentally empowering civilians. "Artificial intelligence has the potential to redefine our economy and transform the cou…