Where is Trump’s “HOAX” line about AI extinction risk coming from? The New York Times ran an article yesterday from four of its White House-whispering journalists who have been trying to find out.
The money quote:
People who have discussed the subject with Mr. Trump in private say his outbursts are rooted in worries that if the artificial intelligence boom fueling the American economy slows down, the market could crash and recession could quickly follow.
And elsewhere in the piece:
Mr. Trump seems driven chiefly by the sense that A.I. is the way to economic growth and nothing can be allowed to stand in its way.
This backs one of my leading theories from last week, which is that Trump is laser focused on the economic indicators he thinks will determine the November elections: stock prices and gas prices. So he’s listening to his industry confidants who insist that any kind of regulation or slowdown would crash the economy and hand the AI boom to China. These include venture capitalist (and former White House AI & Crypto Czar) David Sacks and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
That’s not great news, but it means Trump might also be primed to listen to warnings coming from inside his White House that not reining in AI could also crash the economy. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has been meeting with an informal group this year to “deal with the risk created by new, more powerful models.” Specifically, the Times says she worries that AI “could cause massive disruptions across industries, including hacks into major financial institutions that could destabilize the world economy.”
We should be careful of going too far with the economic interpretations for Trump’s behavior. His “HOAX” response also serves as a simple (if dubious) counter to Democrats running on AI issues or bashing the White House’s light-touch posture toward the industry.
But many in the White House seem capable of seeing AI as more than a political object:
Now, even the biggest A.I. boosters in the administration concede that A.I.-fueled hacks into infrastructure, biological threats, attacks on nuclear command-and-control systems, job losses and global financial instability seem more possible than they did before A.I. agents went rogue.
Trump’s remarks have contributed to a pessimistic mood on Pennsylvania Avenue about the prospects for substantive dealmaking with China this week, when President Xi and his delegation will be meeting with Trump and his team in D.C. But hope is flowing through attempts to build on the no-brainers agreed to in the past, like the Biden-era joint statement about not letting AI make decisions about the use of nuclear weapons.
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