Former President Barack Obama said the government should “act fast” and regulate artificial intelligence, speaking at Colgate University on Friday, where he criticized the Trump administration’s dismissal of concerns over rapid AI development. “Government has to be regulating this,” Obama said, rejecting the argument from one of Donald Trump’s main advisers that the market will take care of it and that companies will solve safety issues because they have every incentive to do so, with people suing them if it turns out to be dangerous. “That’s not how we treat airlines or drug companies, food companies,” he said. Obama encouraged voters to pay attention to candidates’ AI plans, saying that if somebody does not have a serious plan for how to deal with this, then they’re not meeting the moment and voters should probably look for somebody else. Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the industry needed to reduce the speed of its work, cautioning that a swarm of AI agents might be able to take over the internet in six months to a year unless companies devoted more time to putting safeguards in place. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, also said companies should start coordinating on AI safety without waiting for the government to introduce legislation.