Trump Wants an AI Force and a Czar Who Meets One Key Bar

President Donald Trump said he is forming an AI Force and will soon name an artificial intelligence (AI) czar, promising not to hinder or stifle the industry’s growth.

He posted the plan on Truth Social on Saturday and modeled the body on the Space Force. He has not yet named a budget, a structure, or a candidate for the czar job.

Trump Calls the AI Backlash a Hoax 

Trump has spent September arguing that the backlash against AI is manufactured. He called fears of an AI takeover a hoax during a live call with Nvidia’s chief, Jensen Huang, last week.

Saturday’s post carried that argument further. He filed the campaign against AI alongside a list of what he calls hoaxes.

“Over the years, there have been many Hoaxes, all generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country. RUSSIA…UKRAINE…Global Warming, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, Men in Women’s Sports, Transgender for Everyone, and now, the decimation, or destruction, of AI, commonly known as Artificial Intelligence,” he said.

According to Trump, the effort started as an attack on data centers and fizzled once communities saw higher salaries, lower taxes, and safer streets. He said opponents then moved on to AI itself, in the same way they swapped “global warming” for “climate change” to widen the room for doubt.

Trump had already warned towns that reject data centers they would end up backwards and poor. He now told readers that AI could eventually account for as much as 25% of US gross domestic product, and that the country leads China in the race to build it.

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AI Force Gets a Space Force Template and a Czar Seat to Fill

Trump pledged that the government would cherish and help the industry rather than slow it down. At the same time, he said officials would watch for wrongdoing, and that existing criminal and civil law is already enough to catch it.

The AI Force is his vehicle for that job. Trump pointed to Space Force, which he called a tremendous success from his first term, as the template, and said the czar announcement would follow soon. He set one bar for the job.

“Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!” he wrote.

The czar role has sat empty since March, when David Sacks left the White House AI and crypto post. Sacks still advises Trump as co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Lab Researchers Put Odds on the Risk Trump Calls a Hoax

Trump’s post named Democrats as the source of the pressure on AI. The loudest recent warnings, however, have come from safety staff inside the lab building the technology.

Marcus Williams, a member of OpenAI’s Safety Oversight team, put the odds of human extinction at 70% within three years without regulation or a coordinated slowdown.

Bilal Chughtai quit Google DeepMind’s AGI safety team and said the technology could kill everyone. An Anthropic researcher also published a similar warning in early September.

Trump gave no date for the czar announcement. Whom he picks will show how much weight the White House gives to the researchers now asking it to slow down.

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