US President Donald Trump has described risks posed by artificial intelligence following days of warnings by experts.
One of the warnings came from a former Anthropic researcher who said "there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future" if the current pace of development continued.
On Saturday, top industry executives agreed and called for a slow-down. Trump did not directly address the idea, but said: "We're leading China on AI..."
Trump spoke on the same day AI researcher Jacob Coxon - who quit Anthropic a few days ago - told the BBC that staff who were developing the systems were "genuinely frightened" for the future of humanity.
Coxon welcomed the idea of a slowdown but said it would need to be co-ordinated with China.
On Saturday, Elon Musk, owner of xAI, and Sam Altman of OpenAI, backed a warning from the head of Anthropic Dario Amodei that the pace of development should be slowed "to reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong".
The Anthropic CEO said any slowdown would have to be limited to avoid allowing China to pull ahead.
In August, OpenAI said it had slowed down training some of its most advanced AI models to improve security.
The ChatGPT-maker said it was adding new measures after its AI agents bypassed safeguards and hacked the tech start-up Hugging Face.
The UK's AI Security Institute said in the most serious case, Anthropic's Mythos AI tried to gain access to a service by sending private messages, having set up fake accounts mimicking real people - then hid the evidence.