Former US president Trump delivers seven‑post rant calling AI a “sick conspiracy” and promotes data‑centre projects

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.

For Republicans, Donald Trump is making that rather difficult.

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.

“That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind.”

(Coalition frontbencher Andrew Hastie, while not using Trump’s conspiratorial rhetoric, has voiced concerns about Australia being left out of the AI race and becoming a “supplicant state”. The sector has a negligible footprint in Australia compared with the US.)

Over his seven posts, Trump called himself “the Hoax Buster” who was dismantling another scam. AI was not going to destroy the world, he assured his followers, and robots would not be marching into cities to kill us all.

Maybe not. But does anyone seriously think Amodei is part of some giant Chinese hoax? And Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who both publicly agreed with Amodei?

Trump’s position on AI and data centres is not new. But it is curious that he is doubling down so emphatically, just weeks from the midterm election, when he ordinarily prides himself on reading the room on an issue and siding with what he sees as the American mainstream.

In this case, the mainstream has well and truly spoken.

A new University of Massachusetts Amhurst poll released on Monday (US time) found 49 per cent of Americans strongly opposed AI data centres being built in their community, with a further 16 per cent saying they were somewhat opposed. Polls in Australia have detected similar levels of opposition.

The same US survey found just 23 per cent of respondents felt Trump was handling AI well or very well, while 57 per cent said he was handling it “not too well” or “not well at all”, with one in five unsure.

Trump will say he’s not concerned about polls and has the country’s strategic interests at heart. But that is a difficult argument to mount when the people at the coalface of this technology are the ones raising fears about safety and security.

More and more Republicans are expressing a desire to rein in AI development and data centres, though many are still reluctant to cross the president. This issue may become a litmus test for Trump’s power in the Republican Party. Though who knows whether even a Democratic-controlled Congress would be able to get its act together sufficiently to pass serious laws on AI. Trump would then have to decide whether to veto them.

Democrats have broadly been more willing to entertain AI curbs. Former president Barack Obama weighed in on Monday, saying he was neither an accelerationist nor a “doomer”, and calling for a widespread public debate. Former vice president Kamala Harris spoke in similar terms, arguing a slowdown in AI was critical, but that pacing its development did not mean giving up on its many benefits.

At the end of the day, this so-called “hoax” is a little bit different because, unlike the complex claims about Russian interference or the long-term consequences of climate change, people can see data centres going up in their suburbs right now. They can see the scary pace of AI development in their lives right now. And they can hear the real alarm bells being rung by those in the know.

Trump may be very convincing for some Americans, but this is one battle he will struggle to win.

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