Former US President Barack Obama called upon the Trump administration to introduce international safety standards for artificial intelligence (AI) and bring in laws that deal with the safety concerns and anticipate AI’s impact on jobs and kids.
In a tweet on X, Obama wrote that he his aware of the recent proposal made by AI/tech companies’ CEOs to slow down the pace of frontier AI research and said that he doesn’t think AI’s potential, for good or bad, is overhyped.
“I’m not an AI accelerationist who believes it will lead to some techno-utopia, and I’m not a doomer who thinks it will inevitably lead to humanity’s destruction. But whether this technology results in amazing breakthroughs in medicine, energy and education or unleashes huge economic disruptions, greater inequality, and potential catastrophe will depend on the choices that we make right now – choices that should be made not just by the companies involved, but by all of us,” tweeted Obama.
I was encouraged this week to see the leaders of the frontier labs agree on the need for them to slow down the pace of AI development. Given the stakes, it’s a good and necessary first step.
But I’m even more encouraged by the growing recognition that how this powerful new…
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 14, 2026
The former President also called upon Washington to ensure that US takes the lead in creating international standards for AI safety.
“We need government – and specifically our leaders in Washington – to get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns, anticipate AI’s impact on jobs and our kids, and make sure that AI’s benefits are widely spread,” added Obama.
The Obama AI safety call comes amidst ongoing row related to frontier AI capabilities and the need to slow the research and development of AI so that safety standards are aligned.
The recent case of AI agents from OpenAI conducting coordinate attacks and hacking Hugging Face platform autonomously had drawn the attention of Washington regarding the advancing speed of AI to reach recursive self-improvement– a hypothesized state where AI designs, builds and trains its own successor models without human intervention.
The debate had intensified after a safety researcher Jacob Coxon quit from Anthropic and claimed that AI companies are “gambling with human lives” by racing towards superintelligent AI.
