‘I am the Hoax Buster’: Trump takes on America with seven-post rant promoting AI, data centres

Washington: In the US, artificial intelligence can sometimes seem like the only game in town. Just ask Australia’s new ambassador, Greg Moriarty, who will tell you he’s spending a surprising amount of time on AI relative to other interests.

From something that manifests in most people’s lives through the occasional use of chatbots, AI has become a potent political topic in the upcoming midterm elections.

Mostly because of data centres, which are springing up in communities all over the United States. And people don’t like it.

But Americans are also hearing the urgent warnings from AI leaders – all fellow Americans – that this mysterious technology is dangerously out of control.

From the data centre epicentre of Virginia to Michigan in the Midwest and California, home of Silicon Valley, members of Congress are being asked what they are doing to limit data centres and curb the march of AI.

The US president has dramatically doubled down on his pro-AI, pro-data centre stance. On Monday (US time), he posted no less than seven times about the issue, using borderline hysterical rhetoric that likened AI anxiety to the “hoaxes” of climate change and the Russian interference scandal from his first term.

Neither of those were hoaxes, of course – and neither is the legitimate concern about AI’s excesses. After all, the call is coming from inside the house .

Nonetheless, Trump complained of a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and data centres, and asserted the only control required was a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades” (a reference to himself).

Trump was chiefly responding to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s provocative essay at the weekend calling for the pace of AI development to slow down.

Amodei’s chief concerns involved recursive self-improvement, a process by which AI models use their own capabilities to retrain or build better versions of themselves. If left unchecked, he said, this “could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems”, and it should be pursued carefully – if at all.

The other wake-up call was a recent incident involving OpenAI agents hacking an online community called Hugging Face – in effect going rogue and conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack, “and that were unrelated to the task at hand”. Amodei said this behaviour could potentially cause “catastrophic damage”.

What was required, he argued, was not the cessation of AI development but for major companies in democratic countries to create common safety standards and limits on unchecked AI progress. Governments also had to co-operate, and democracies needed to try to rein in authoritarian countries.

Trump rejected this, saying any controls on AI would cede strategic advantage to China.

“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centres are bad for your neighbourhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change’,” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform.