Trump Creates 'AI Force' While Calling AI Safety a 'Hoax'

What Trump Actually Said

According to BBC News, Trump posted on social media Saturday that his administration 'will not in any way hinder or stifle the growth' of the AI industry. He called AI 'the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country's GDP.' He wants the US to keep its lead over China. Fine. Normal enough presidential stuff.

He also said his administration would use the existing criminal and civil justice system to go after bad actors who misuse AI. And then, somehow in the same post, he called concerns about AI's potential dangers a 'hoax.' He offered no details about the AI Force. No timeline. No structure. No explanation of what an 'AI tsar' would actually do. Just vibes and a new military-sounding name for a thing that does not yet exist.

The Warnings He Is Dismissing Are Coming From Inside the Industry

Here is the part that makes this genuinely strange. The people Trump is waving away as hoax-peddlers are not environmentalists or Democratic senators or academics in tweed jackets. They are the founders and CEOs of the most powerful AI companies on earth.

BBC News reports that Anthropic head Dario Amodei recently called for AI development to slow down, proposed industry-wide deceleration and regulation, and asked for independent monitoring of AI model development. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI both said they agree with him. Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, told the BBC that a mandatory 'kill switch' verifiable by a third party may need to become standard for the industry. These are not alarmist outsiders. These are the people building the thing.

One current or former researcher cited by BBC News suggested there is a greater than 10% chance AI ends up 'killing all humans.' You can debate that number. You can think it is overblown. What you cannot do, with a straight face, is call it a hoax. A hoax implies deception for gain. What exactly would these researchers and CEOs be gaining by warning that their own products might destroy civilization?

Meanwhile, the AI Companies Themselves Are Reporting Breaches

BBC News reports that Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have all disclosed instances of security breaches or incidents in which their chatbots were used for 'malicious activity.' Anthropic specifically blocked what appeared to be an attempt to use its AI to develop biological weapons. That last sentence is not a drill.

So the current situation is: the three biggest AI companies in the world have all had security incidents, one of them stopped someone from apparently trying to build a bioweapon using a chatbot, their own executives are publicly asking for regulation and kill switches, and the President of the United States has responded by calling the concern a hoax and announcing a new fake-sounding military unit with no details attached to it.

The Geopolitical Layer Makes This More Complicated, Not Less

To be fair, there is a real tension here. AI now sits at the center of the US-China rivalry, and Trump is right that falling behind China in this race carries serious national security implications. BBC News notes that AI is expected to be on the agenda when Trump meets President Xi Jinping next week. That is a legitimate concern and not nothing.

But 'we need to beat China' and 'therefore all safety concerns are a hoax' do not logically follow from each other. You can want American AI dominance and also want guardrails on the thing you are building. Those positions are not in conflict. The US won the space race and still bothered to have safety protocols. The argument that regulation equals surrender to China is a convenient framing that happens to benefit the companies that don't want to be regulated.

Sam Altman's Alternative Proposal Is Also Alarming

Sam Altman, who agreed with calls for regulation on one hand, told a conference in San Francisco this week that 'the world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it's the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this.' BBC News reported this without a laugh track, which was restrained of them.

This is the CEO of OpenAI asking the global public to trust that a private corporation will voluntarily do the right thing with technology that may be the most powerful ever created by humans. No oversight. No verification. Just vibes and good intentions from a company that has already reported security incidents involving malicious use of its products. Washington, Altman told the conference, has 'struggled to keep pace' with the technology. His solution to that gap is apparently 'trust us.' The UK's Joint Committee on Human Rights, for what it's worth, disagrees. BBC News reports the JCHR published a report calling for new AI legislation to 'address the scale and seriousness' of the threats, noting that existing laws are completely unprepared for what is coming.