Mostly True
The heads of the world's "big three" AI developers have publicly warned that artificial intelligence could lead to humanity's extinction, and U.S. President Donald Trump has fired back in person, branding the doomsayers a "negative force," according to a claim examined by this newspaper's verification desk. The desk reviewed ten primary sources and found the core account broadly supported, though several original postings could not be opened directly.
The claim rests on two linked developments. First, the leaders of the three dominant AI labs โ the figures routinely referred to in Korean coverage as the "AI Big 3" โ have issued repeated public warnings that unchecked AI development could pose an extinction-level risk to humankind. Second, Trump responded with a frontal rebuttal, dismissing the pessimistic camp as "negative forces," the Korean rendering of the phrase cited in the claim ("๋ถ์ ์ ์ธ๋ ฅ").
The clash captures the widening divide at the top of the industry: lab chiefs pressing the case for treating advanced AI as a survival-scale risk, against a White House framing such talk as hostile to innovation.
Verification was not straightforward. Among the ten primary sources examined were posts on X by Elon Musk, but those pages either demanded a login or returned empty, and could not be read in full. The desk therefore relied on search-engine snippets and citations across multiple media outlets as substitute confirmation.
On that basis, the essential sequence of events โ extinction warnings from the big three AI chiefs, followed by a direct Trump rebuttal casting them as "negative forces" โ is corroborated across independent reports, even though the original posts and the precise wording of Trump's remarks could not be confirmed at the source. The claim is judged Mostly True.