Trump Says He Had an AI Executive "Kiss His Wife Goodbye and Prepare for Jail"

Trump appeared on CBS's 60 Minutes last Sunday. The host asked him for his thoughts on AI executives repeatedly warning of safety risks from their own models. His answer was very straightforward: the risks are not that real, they are manageable, and they are already being managed.

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Per The Verge's reporting, Trump's exact words were: "I think the risks are far less real than they make them sound, the risks can be managed, and they are being managed." He gave the Department of Justice credit for this "management", then shared a very detailed story.

He said someone previously reported to his team that a certain person was using AI to do bad things. They made a call to that person, with a very tough tone: "Get ready to go to prison. Please kiss your wife goodbye, good night."

Trump refused to name who this person was, only revealing he is the head of "a large AI company", in his exact words, "one of the biggest ones". The report cuts off here, with no details on whether the person actually went to prison later, nor which specific law the Department of Justice cited to make that call.

For background, over the past two years, AI company executives have indeed made many strong public statements. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have both signed joint statements that rank AI's existential risk at the same level as nuclear war. Lawmakers have raised questions, regulators have raised questions, and even their own internal safety teams have raised concerns. The Trump administration's long-running stance has been to stay out of the way and let the industry move fast. Earlier this year, the White House rolled out a set of executive orders focused on loosening restrictions for AI companies to maintain a leading edge over China.

So the absurdity of this story is: AI bosses themselves say "the thing we are building could be very dangerous", the president says "it's not dangerous", then the Department of Justice calls and says "you will go to prison if you keep acting recklessly". Resolving technical safety issues with criminal threats is very Trumpian, and very American.

As for who the person that was told to kiss his wife goodbye is, Trump did not say. You can only guess. Given that he said it is "one of the biggest ones", the list of possible candidates is very short.