Asked at his Irish golf course on Sunday whether the AI industry should slow down or face more regulation, Donald Trump didn’t need to waste any time prompting ChatGPT to help him answer. Trump replied that “very negative forces” were raising “things that won’t happen.” And while guardrails were possible, America leads China, and “whoever wins AI, wins.” Then, on Monday, Trump went further in a Truth Social post that nobody could accuse of having been written by AI. "The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" Trump wrote.
"The Trump Administration has stopped AI 'people' from doing bad, or potentially bad, 'things,' like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a 'perfect little angel' - and we will continue to do so! "We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China.
We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!" It is a certain answer to a question about uncertainty: we must press forward with frontier AI and dismiss the fears of those from the industry who put the probability of a humanity-ending outcome at greater than 10 percent. But it also inverted a standard Trump has applied to catastrophic risks elsewhere.
Specifically, in the Russia-Ukraine war. Eleven months earlier, in the Cabinet Room, Trump was asked whether the threat of giving powerful Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine had helped bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table. Trump said he could not tell what was bringing Putin anywhere.
The threat was good, he added, and then, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky beside him, Trump turned on the weapon. Tomahawks were incredible, among the most accurate ever built, and very dangerous. But it "could mean big escalation,” Trump warned reporters.
Trump’s philosophy of risk was that the uncertainty around the catastrophic potential required restraint. It simply wasn’t worth the gamble, the odds of a terrible outcome too great to roll the dice on. This is language Trump has used himself.
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