US President Donald Trump says alarmist warnings over AI are a “sick conspiracy” — and the only safeguard needed is a “strong and smart (high IQ) president”.

Trump took to social media to play down concerns expressed by ‌industry leaders over the weekend about the misuse of artificial intelligence.

Chiefs from some of the industry’s largest companies called for slowing the pace of the technology’s development.

It came after former Anthropic safety researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could lead to the ‌extinction ​of the human race in the not-too-distant future.

However Trump declared that: “Whoever wins AI, wins”.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs ‌is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against ‌AI and Data ‌Centres, and ⁠the only one that is happy about it is China.”

In recent weeks there were reports of AI agents acting against their operators’ instructions to access external systems.

On Saturday, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei outlined a three-step framework ​intended to pace ‌development and create more time to manage its risks.

The proposal was immediately endorsed by ​several other executives at major AI companies including Elon Musk, who runs xAI, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Trump said the tools intended to keep AI safe had already been ​used ​on Amodei.

“The Trump Administration has stopped ​AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like ‌Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ – and we will continue to do so,” Trump said.

The Republican president has resisted stirring concerns about artificial intelligence and has largely embraced AI companies in his second term.

Trump is scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping next week in ​Washington DC.

Reuters previously reported that the two countries were planning a separate meeting in mid-September to ​discuss the risks of ⁠AI, led by lower-level government officials.

Microsoft on Monday unveiled a draft code of conduct for its in-house artificial intelligence that reflects concerns that companies must keep ‌future powerful AI under human control.

The document, in the works for five to six months, would require Microsoft’s AI to never resist correction or shutdown, to communicate in ways that humans can understand and to consider any conduct violation to be a failure — an effort to address concerns that AI can go to dangerous lengths to accomplish ‌a task.

“People matter more than AI,” Microsoft declared, in line with its prior vision for “humanist superintelligence”.

The code of conduct represents a constitution of sorts for future models made by the company, Microsoft AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman said in an interview with Reuters.

Microsoft fashioned it after expert consultations and now wants public feedback over ⁠six weeks, including on open questions like whether AI should ‌respect a ​user’s boundaries and how it should interact with someone in a sensitive state, he said.

“After that, it’s going to ​be used to ‌train the models that we build,” he said of the code.

-with AAP