Attorney General Todd Blanche sought to clarify President Donald Trump’s criticism of the calls for an artificial intelligence development slowdown as a “hoax,” contending the issue is only being discussed now because November’s midterm elections are 50 days away.
Blanche told reporters that what Trump described as a “hoax” was the way the debate exploded onto the national scene after former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned last week, predicting that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”
“This should not be breaking news,” Blanche said during a press briefing in the Rose Garden at the White House. “That this AI issue, that’s suddenly come up two months before an election, is being — the president calls it a hoax. That the way this has come around today and not three months ago.”
“I was watching the news today,” Blanche added. “Every Democrat senator suddenly races to a microphone to talk about AI after being eerily silent for months and months and months. So to talk about the timing of this as being nothing but an effort to influence the midterms, I shouldn’t have to say that out loud. Of course, that’s what it is.”
The attorney general’s comments come after Trump described the complaints as a “hoax” in a lengthy social media post, then phoned Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during an industry summit, a conversation Huang put on speakerphone.
“The robots will not be taking over,” Trump told the All-In Summit on Monday. “The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax.”
Despite the president’s comments, AI industry leaders and lawmakers on Capitol Hill have continued to call for new guardrails to be put into place.
During the Rose Garden press briefing, Blanche told reporters such guardrails were unlikely to come from the Justice Department. Blanche said that was the result of the DOJ being made up of prosecutors, not regulators. The attorney general did, however, promise to pursue anyone who violates criminal law.
But when pressed on whether AI companies could violate antitrust laws to coordinate a slowdown, Blanche demurred.
“Whether entities need an antitrust waiver is not something I can answer from the podium of the White House,” he said. “There’s dozens of factors that go into that, and there’s an application process, and there’s a kind of a process that DOJ and others use to determine [that]. I can’t address that. I can say that to the extent that those companies are looking to regulate themselves or fix problems that they have, that they should do that, but working with us if necessary.”
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote an open letter last weekend calling for an international development slowdown, a call with which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk agreed.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, like Trump and the White House, has similarly downplayed the concerns.