The president of the United States spent part of his Saturday running a poll on whether artificial intelligence should be called Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence or Supreme Intelligence. By the time he was done posting, he had also announced a Space Force-style body for the technology and written off the whole AI safety debate as a Democratic hoax.
That’s a lot of policy for one afternoon on Truth Social. None of it came with details.
The rebrand comes first
Trump opened with the name. “Many people think that the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent, relative to AI, or Artificial Intelligence,” he wrote, then put the three replacement names up to a vote. The poll was still open at publication time.
A couple of hours later, the tone shifted. Trump said attempts at “the decimation, or destruction, of AI” belong on a list of “many” Democratic hoaxes, one he said includes “RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE, Global Warming, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, Men in Women’s Sports, [and] Transgender for Everyone.” Concerns about AI safety, in his telling, were “generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country.”
Data centers, then AI
Trump laid out a sequence. The so-called hoax, he said, “began with an attack on our Data Centers, until people realized how wealthy and prestigious they were for the Communities in which they were built.” Now that “the crazed Data Center attack has largely failed,” critics are “going straight at AI.” He said he “will not stand by and let this happen.”
He offered no evidence that suspicion of AI and data centers is anything other than organic and sincere. And the record doesn’t split neatly along party lines: both Republicans and Democrats have taken aim at data centers, and New York recently became the first state to halt permits for large projects.
The post tracks with what Trump said at a golf tournament last weekend, where he said he’s open to “guardrails” but argued, “I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up.”
An AI Force with no job description
The one firm promise, such as it is, arrives at the end. Trump said he will “cherish [the AI industry,] help it, and watch over it, as it grows,” and that he’s forming an AI Force similar to the Space Force he established in his first term.
He also said he will be announcing “in the near future” an AI “Czar,” adding that “Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!”
What the AI Force will do, or what the czar will be responsible for, went unsaid. The last person to hold a comparable title, venture capitalist David Sacks, stepped down as Trump’s AI and crypto czar earlier this year to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Why the timing isn’t an accident
The safety argument Trump is waving away got louder recently after an AI researcher said he was quitting Anthropic because the leading AI companies “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade” and are “gambling with our lives.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei then released a plan to “pace the frontier,” which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk seemingly endorsed.
Not everyone buys that framing either. Critics of the AI industry have suggested that much of the existential-threat talk is a distraction from AI’s more immediate harms.
The industry’s biggest name is already lined up behind the president. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took a call from Trump on stage during the All-In Summit, which Sacks co-hosts, agreed that the AI backlash is a “hoax” and said “we’re not going to let” a slowdown happen. The vote on what to call the thing they’re both defending is still open.
