GoKawiilThe private sector is more than capable of addressing the risks posed by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CNBC on Tuesday.
"I think these are completely solvable problems," Hassett said on "Squawk Box."
Hassett's remarks largely align with President Donald Trump, who went on a social media rampage Monday against AI industry leaders and others who have raised alarms about their own models.
But the message contrasts with a growing number of influential voices, including the heads of several top AI companies, calling for strengthened protections — or even a slowdown in development — around the nascent technology.
"The idea that we're going to simply allow a kind of, 'We'll trust you to take care of this,' would be shortsighted," Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" later Tuesday morning.
Warner, who spoke over the weekend with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI chief Sam Altman, said some AI companies' experimentation on their products "has been sloppy to date."
"I think we need some guardrails around data centers, kids, around AI agents, some pre-testing in terms of national security," Warner said.
Responding to Hassett's remarks, Warner said, "The idea that we're going to say to the wealthiest companies in the world, 'Hey, we're going to trust you guys to do this on your own and have no cross-check,' I don't think the American people are going to get much assurance from that."
Concerns over AI have become a front-burner issue, especially following a recent warning from Anthropic's Amodei, whose call for an AI slowdown was backed by Altman and SpaceX 's Elon Musk.
But Trump, in numerous heated Truth Social posts a day earlier, called those concerns a "hoax."
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