Trump Responds to AI Panic by Pouring Gasoline on It

President Donald Trump is aware of the panic over the possibility that one day we will all be ruled — or worse — by machines. But when asked directly about artificial intelligence , he doesn’t seem all that worried.

On Monday, the president claimed that fears about AI -driven social collapse were a “HOAX,” later describing himself as the “Hoax Buster” and comparing AI skepticism to the “Global Warming Scam.”

“Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.”

Trump wrote hours earlier that the only “guardrail” necessary is a “High IQ” president, and added later that

Trump’s comments come in the midst of a chaotic media frenzy around the safety of AI, one that was kicked off by a series of high-profile industry defections and loud warnings about the dangers of the rapidly developing technology. On September 8, a prominent AI safety researcher named Jacob Coxton resigned from Anthropic , one of the industry’s largest companies, claiming that both it and its main rival OpenAI were acting irresponsibly and “gambling with our lives.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxton wrote on X. “This is not a marketing stunt.”

Coxton’s announcement prompted an industry-wide response, including a lengthy essay from Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei that acknowledged and even agreed with many of Coxton’s concerns, urging peers in the industry to begin limiting the capabilities of the software. AI stocks took a nose dive, and politicians started facing consistent inquiries as to their stances on various points of contention in the industry. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

The core of the AI-phobic argument is that the unrestricted growth of AI technology is approaching a point in which computer algorithms become so advanced that they are able to improve themselves — and even make decisions — without the input of human programmers. ( Amodei calls it “recursive self improvement .”) That future would mean that AI systems would gain the ability to affect the world outside of human input, which people fear could be enormously damaging if the algorithms decided to act maliciously. It’s not a singularity, per se, but more a runaway train on a global digital scale.

Anthropic and other AI companies appear to be conscious enough of this that they have actively asked for more government regulation, admitting that the free market system they’ve been working in could produce a disastrous outcome as competitors race to out-do each other.

The AI debate is a thorny, deeply complex topic, one that is clearly crying out for a steady hand to moderate the relationships between government regulators and the anarchic mess of private companies all seeking to profit off the technology.