{"id":914976,"date":"2026-09-30T05:58:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T05:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/914976\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T05:58:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T05:58:12","slug":"trumps-blase-attitude-toward-ai-risks-backfiring-politically","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/914976\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s blas\u00e9 attitude toward AI risks backfiring politically"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n President Donald Trump held court on the White House drive Tuesday, surrounded by the tech moguls who, in their own estimation, hold the planet\u2019s fate in their hands.\n <\/p>\n

\n Hours earlier, the rising warnings by AI firms took another dark turn with the revelation that Anthropic fears<\/a> its models pose a \u201ccatastrophic or existential risk to humanity.\u201d The news came, incongruously, in the prospectus \u2014 obtained by Reuters<\/a> \u2014 for a coming IPO that could raise tens of billions of dollars for the cash-hungry company.\n <\/p>\n

\n The meeting offered a prime moment for presidential leadership of a nation concerned by the new technology\u2019s risks<\/a>, not least because many of Trump\u2019s guests had been pleading for government regulation<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n The response from Trump, whom House Speaker Mike Johnson correctly described as the only person with the clout to bring together such a group, was familiar: a rebrand.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWe\u2019ve changed the name, officially, today. We\u2019ve changed the name officially to SI,\u201d Trump said. \u201cSI instead of AI \u2026 You know what that means? \u2018Super\u2019 \u2026 That\u2019s quite an announcement.\u201d Trump had earlier vowed there would be no slowdown in AI research despite the chilling fears of its inventors. He declared that they\u2019d signed a pledge to \u201cself-police\u201d that was \u201cmorally binding.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The president, a man prone to hyperbole, couldn\u2019t stop gushing about AI. Or SI. \u201cIt is the biggest thing there is, maybe the biggest thing there\u2019s ever been,\u201d he said, celebrating his latest attempt to reshape inconvenient political reality<\/a> with a name change.\n <\/p>\n

\n If, in years to come, Trump turns out to be correct that fears of AI\u2019s pernicious possibilities are overblown, he could look like a visionary. His belief that AI represents a race for dominance over superpower foe China could deliver a geopolitical victory to the United States. And his argument that over-regulation could strangle an industry critical to America\u2019s economic stability should not be dismissed, given the industry\u2019s importance to future economic growth and wider prosperity.\n <\/p>\n

\"Protesters<\/p>\n

\n But Trump\u2019s at times glib performance also raised some troubling questions.\n <\/p>\n

\n It hardly seems as though he\u2019s emerging from a period of personal soul-searching that such a disruptive technology might demand. President George W. Bush, by contrast, spent a summer mulling the morality and utility of stem cell research on his ranch in Texas in 2001. Trump blocks out anyone talking about the risks of AI or the threat that rogue agents might cause, calling such concerns a Democratic Party \u201choax\u201d meant to hurt Republicans.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump\u2019s answer to voters who worry that AI will take their jobs, or who look askance at data centers\u2019 enormous strains on electrical grids and water supplies, is an optimistic promise that such installations are \u201cgoing to be very popular\u201d and will make everyone rich.\n <\/p>\n

\n He\u2019s causing himself an immediate political problem. Some 75% of Americans view the growth of AI with fear and concern, according to a CNN\/SSRS poll last week, and 71% want the federal government to do more to regulate it. Higher electricity bills attributed to the immense proliferation of data centers are deepening affordability frustrations among voters \u2014 a top midterm election issue.\n <\/p>\n

\n Longer term, Trump has left himself extraordinarily exposed to a potential political backlash if the now-regular revelations about AI attacking corporate or government websites herald a true national or global crisis. If it turns out that AI firms, as he insists, can\u2019t regulate themselves, it will be on him.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump\u2019s blas\u00e9 attitude mirrors the approach he took to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in his first term, when he seemed to believe that wishing the threat away would expunge it. Most notoriously, he once argued that if the country stopped testing for the virus, it would have no more cases.\n <\/p>\n

\n More fundamentally, Trump\u2019s assurances that the AI industry can police itself are open to debate. There\u2019s little evidence that tech industry titans \u2014 especially those whose social media brands changed modern society and the nature of childhood \u2014 engage in deep thought about the societal impact of their creations.\n <\/p>\n

\n This is an industry that rarely appears to believe it is accountable to citizens and their democratic leaders, or to desire meaningful oversight and guardrails. The inventors of new technologies have quickly become oligarchs with extraordinary power, including the capacity to influence elections \u2014 like Elon Musk, with his massive campaign funding for Trump and other GOP candidates.\n <\/p>\n

\n So to believe that competing titans \u2014 not all of whose firms may survive the competition \u2014 will cooperate for the common good, or, as Trump said, because of \u201ca love for our country,\u201d requires an enormous leap of faith.\n <\/p>\n

\"Nvidia<\/p>\n

\n Ideologically, Trump\u2019s second term has been an exercise on removing restraints on industry, business and wealthy interests across every sector. Personally, Trump accepts few restraints on his behavior. He hates guardrails around the presidency, so it\u2019s no surprise he abhors them in relation to the tech industry.\n <\/p>\n

\n Yet a blanket refusal to impose any safety restraints on the AI industry raises the question of why it should be different from other areas of American life. Civil aviation, for example, is so safe because every accident or incident has been investigated for generations, and the lessons incorporated into safety measures. Governments have long concluded that safety and well-being of the populace mean the food industry, medical advances, the automobile industry and others cannot be trusted to take care of the public welfare over their own narrower interests. Rules are enforced by laws, regulations and penalties such as fines.\n <\/p>\n

\n So why should the AI industry be any different?\n <\/p>\n

\n Kristian Hammond, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University, explained the logic of regulation. \u201cYou only put guardrails on things that are broken that are not under your control,\u201d Hammond told CNN\u2019s Kasie Hunt. \u201cIf you had a car that \u2026 was really fast and really easy to steer but every once in a while it would just slam you into a wall, you wouldn\u2019t say, \u2018Oh, we need guardrails.\u2019 You\u2019d say, \u2018We need to fix the steering.\u2019\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Hammond went on: \u201cThe place where we are with AI right now is we don\u2019t have the explicit controls that we need in order to make these things effective.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n A subtext of Trump\u2019s presidency is the blunt assertion of power. On Tuesday, the AI industry became the latest example of his apparent conviction that almost everything in American life is his to control.\n <\/p>\n

\n As he lunched with AI chiefs, the president released a seating chart showing him flanked by Musk \u2014 the world\u2019s richest person \u2014 and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the world\u2019s richest company. Later, the photo op on the White House drive positioned Trump as the dominant figure, towering over some of the richest and most brilliant technological pioneers in human history.\n <\/p>\n

\n At one point, a reporter asked the tech leaders \u2014 some of whom sparked near-hysteria by warning of the dire impact of AI \u2014 whether they agreed with Trump that no regulation was necessary and that self-policing would blunt any destructive potential of their models.\n <\/p>\n

\n They didn\u2019t get the chance to answer.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI mean, I can tell you the answer is yes,\u201d Trump said, jumping in. \u201cWe discussed it with the top about 40 people,\u201d he added, before turning to Huang, who has dismissed AI fears as \u201cdoomsday narratives\u201d and who told reporters Tuesday that \u201cthere\u2019s no conflict between innovation, technology and safety.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump\u2019s stance on AI is emblematic of a presidency that unfolds as a series of gut calls, big bets and a reluctance to publicly explain his reasoning \u2014 or to debate potential courses of action while taking the nation into his confidence.\n <\/p>\n

\n He has a lot riding on AI. The industry is propping up the economy. And his personal fortune is highly exposed to the tech industry.\n <\/p>\n

\n The nation, and the world, has more at stake. A lot more than Trump\u2019s midterm election fate and legacy is riding on him getting this one right.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump held court on the White House drive Tuesday, surrounded by the tech moguls who, in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":914977,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-914976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=914976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/914977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=914976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=914976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=914976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}