Report describes Trump’s shift from AI skeptic to AI promoter

In short: A report says President Trump went from worrying about AI to pushing rapid AI growth after a 2024 meeting with OpenAI leaders.

What's going on

A New York Times video report, featuring White House correspondent Jonathan Swan, describes how President Donald Trump’s views on artificial intelligence changed quickly over the last two years. The report says Trump paid little attention to AI until a private meeting during a campaign stop in Las Vegas in June 2024.

According to the reporting, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and then chief operating officer Brad Lightcap showed Trump what modern AI tools could do. AI here means computer systems that can create text, images, and video, a bit like an auto-complete tool that has become powerful enough to write and design things on command. The executives also previewed Sora, a video generation system, and used it to imagine a “golf course on the moon,” as a simple way to show AI’s creative output.

Before that demo, the report says Trump mainly focused on risks like deepfakes, which are realistic fake audio or video that can make it look like someone said something they did not. The report says Trump was impressed by AI’s ability to rewrite and reshape language, including turning an executive order into a poem, and he called the result “beautiful.”

What to watch

Since returning to office, Trump has publicly argued against stricter limits on advanced AI and has framed regulation as a threat to US competitiveness, especially against China. The key question now is whether his administration will remove rules around AI data centers and deployment, or whether pressure from industry leaders and lawmakers will force new guardrails.

Source: NYTimes