Trump Says He Secretly Threatened to Arrest the Head of a Top AI Lab

Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock By now, it’s obvious that Donald Trump has never had a secret he couldn’t resist blurting out on television. His latest slip-up — if we can really call it that — happened during an interview with CBS’ new and improved 60 Minutes program on Sunday evening. During the interview, Trump took a bizarre left-turn in the conversation to share news that the White House almost moved to arrest a top tech executive over some vague problems with AI safety. It was a “situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI,” Trump explained, using the original term that he later claimed to be officially replacing with “super intelligence.” That “somebody” is apparently an executive at one of the country’s top AI labs, or as Trump put it, “one of the big ones.” Any more details were scarce, other than the fact that person in question has a wife and kids. “We called them very strongly and said, get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss goodnight,” Trump said. “We said, ‘go home right now. See your wife and children. Give them a kiss good night. Because tomorrow morning, you’re going to jail.'” That would seem to rule out tech figures like Apple’s Tim Cook, who has no children of his own, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who has a husband and one son. Elon Musk is divorced, so he doesn’t quite fit either, and it might also rule out Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who may or may not have children. But narrowing Trump’s target down any further would be pure guesswork — figures like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and the now-embattled Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang do have wives and children, facts which have netizens divided on who Trump is ultimately referring to. “It has to be Dario, everyone else has bent the knee,” one poster suggested on Reddit. “Dario doesn’t have kids right?” another user chimed in. “Has to be Zuck.” Others made it clear they don’t trust a word that comes out of Trump’s mouth. “It doesn’t have to be anyone,” a Redditor said, receiving over 400 upvotes. “Trump lies.” More on AI: Trump Living in Alternate World of AI Slop, Insiders Say