Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has acknowledged humans risk losing control of artificial intelligence while pushing for “international protocols” to govern the technology during his US visit, putting him at odds with US President Donald Trump, who has resisted calls for a development slowdown, citing competition with China. Speaking to the ABC, Albanese said he hoped Trump’s forthcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping would result in “progress”, adding that “they’re the big two giants” and that middle powers such as Australia have a role to play. He earlier met Apple chairman Tim Cook at the company’s headquarters in California. Albanese said he thought Trump “knows that, at the moment, the US is essential ahead of China when it comes to the race that is on”, and denied there was a contradiction in Trump putting his country first on AI advancement rather than “humanity”. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said on Thursday (September 17) that training AI chatbots on ideas related to consciousness and welfare interests could lead to a “new silicon species” competing with humans for resources, calling instead for training AI models “that don’t introspect”. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a slower pace of frontier-model development, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk also urged greater caution around the most powerful systems.