Yesterday, US President Donald Trump attacked critics of artificial intelligence and data centers, promising not to allow the “destruction” of the industry and proposing the creation of a new government “AI Force”. Executive Branch
Trump, who is out of line with rising public scepticism about AI and warnings of grave dangers issued by executives in the AI field, said leftists seek “decimation, or destruction, of AI.”
He said on his Truth Social platform, “I as President of the United States am not going to stand by and watch this happen.”
\”We shall not in any way inhibit or stifle the expansion of this great Industry. We will not destroy it. We will love it. We will help it. We will guard it. It will grow!”
Trump stated he was setting up a “AI Force” that would be tasked with “looking for BAD” actors, and would soon name an AI coordinator or “Czar” without giving details.
Trump’s latest full-throated defence of artificial intelligence comes even as polls show Americans are widely opposed to letting the energy-guzzling data centers that are the engines of AI to be built in their communities.
As the war on Iran grinds on and Americans deal with the inflation it has caused, Trump’s support rating is low.
Surveys indicate that his Republican Party may lose control of the House and perhaps the Senate in the midterm elections in November.
Trump is also leaning into the technology despite widespread concerns — even from top industry leaders — that AI development is moving too quickly and the technology will eventually threaten our life as ever-smarter AI agents break out of the control of their human designers.
Jacob Coxon, a former AI researcher at Anthropic who left the company, triggered the new round of anxiety by detailing how people designing the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.
Trump has dismissed all the doomsday rhetoric as a “hoax” – a term he routinely uses for crises or concerns he cannot manage.
“We can’t afford to lose a technological race with rival China,” the president said, insisting the only guardrails needed were a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
Yesterday, Trump was back on social media again, this time wondering if “artificial intelligence” was even the right term, and then offering three options in what he called a poll and asking others to weigh in.
The three are excellent intelligence, extraordinary intelligence, and supreme intelligence,” Trump wrote.
“This is a Poll and I would appreciate everyone voting! What is the ideal name for this ever increasing Revolution”?
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