AI is locked into a Cold War-style arms race between the US and China. For all the talk of a 'slowdown', there's no grown ups to call out the madness - and Donald Trump's not going to save us: SARAH VINE

The rush to beat China to superintelligence has turned AI into a Cold War-style arms race that ignores the technology's risks, Sarah Vine has argued. The longstanding Daily Mail columnist was speaking on the latest episode of the Alas Vine & Hitchens podcast.Vine compared the breathless rush towards AI with the breakneck development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War. She said: 'It's very similar to what happened with nuclear power, which is that basically everyone needs to have them because if you don't have them, then everybody else can bully you, and it's all just about who blinks first. 'And so China, America, everyone's rushing, rushing, rushing to do AI.'Last week saw Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic, the AI lab behind the Claude chatbot, quit his job as he issued a chilling warning over the rapid progress in Al which he fears could kill humanity as soon as 2030. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks at a panel discussion on the potentials, perspectives and challenges in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the Technical University (TU) in Berlin on February 7, 2025Mr Coxon, who previously also worked for OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced his departure in a social media post warning that neither company is 'acting responsibly.''I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,' Coxon wrote on X.'Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.' And Mr Coxon is far from a lone maverick operating on the margins of the industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Saturday warning that AI bosses 'must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.'Mr Amodei said that 'two things' had prompted his rethink of the race to develop the technology.'My first concern is that, since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI,' he wrote.'This dynamic is called recursive self-improvement, and it is starting to happen across the industry, including at Anthropic, as we and others have described.'Amodei went on to outline that his 'second concern' was the 'OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident', in which a 'swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective' and orchestrated cybersecurity attacks. Mr Amodei's words were quoted approvingly on social media by both Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Elon Musk, head honcho of X. However, Donald Trump subsequently sought to play down the risk of AI doom, telling reporters during a visit to Ireland: 'You have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up and they're bringing up things that won't happen.'Writing on his Truth Social platform on Monday, the US President said: '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!'He also directly named AI firm Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei as an AI alarmist who poses as a 'perfect little angel'. '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 also alleged that 'there is a sick conspiracy going on against AI data centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China.' Sarah Vine said: 'Donald Trump, among his many pearls of wisdom, has rejected calls for an AI slowdown, but accepted that some guardrails are possible. 'He thinks we need to lead, and this is, I think, the heart of the problem, which is that we're effectively engaged in a sort of AI cold war. It's like an arms race. 'But all the people who are involved in AI, including people like Sam Altman, are really worried about it, and they don't really understand how it works. They can't really control it. 'It's sort of developed a momentum of its own, and the thing is, it's improving exponentially at a incredibly fast speed.'Despite the intervention of Mr Amodei and the various AI whistleblowers, Vine said she feared there was still no 'grown ups' capable of standing up to the artificial intelligence giants and calling out the 'madness'.She said: 'There's no grown up in the room, and this obviously is part of a conversation about America and wider geopolitics. 'But there is no grown up in the room who's prepared to say, "This is madness. We need to stop and think about it." 'And I think if you look at the history of the internet, you know, right from the very start, nobody bothered to say "This is going to change everything, let's put some protocols in place to make sure that it doesn't completely get out of control." 'And we are now, I think, at the end of that process, and on the cusp of another massive sort of seismic change, and I just don't think anyone really understands how frightening it is.'