Trump Announces an AI Force and AI Czar, Calls Extinction Warnings a “Hoax”

President Trump said Saturday that he will create an “AI Force” and appoint an “AI czar” to lead it, using a rambling Truth Social post to reject weeks of warnings from AI researchers, including one inside Anthropic, that the technology could kill most of humanity within a decade.

“For this purpose, I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term,” Trump wrote, according to Fox News, which reviewed the post alongside NBC News and The Verge. He gave no timeline for standing up the new body and named no candidates for the czar role, offering only a qualification of his own choosing: “I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI ‘Czar’: Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!”

What Trump actually announced

The post is short on structure. Trump did not say whether the AI Force would sit inside an existing federal agency, what legal authority it would carry, or how it would relate to the White House’s existing AI policy staff. He framed the effort as protective rather than restrictive: “We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!” Wrongdoing, he added, would instead be handled “with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System,” a framing that leaves current fraud, securities, and consumer-protection law as the main check on AI companies rather than any new AI-specific rule.

Trump also defended data centers, the physical infrastructure behind the AI buildout that has drawn organized objections from residents, state lawmakers, and utility regulators this year. According to The Verge, he called data centers “wealthy and prestigious” and claimed, without citing evidence, that they raise salaries, lower taxes, and make the communities that host them safer. He separately predicted AI could eventually account for roughly 25 percent of US GDP, describing it, per Fox News, as “the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful.”

The warnings he is dismissing

The announcement lands eleven days after Jacob Coxon, a researcher who had worked on frontier AI systems, resigned and warned publicly that labs were racing out of control, and after Anthropic’s own head of alignment stress testing, Evan Hubinger, said he agreed that AI carries more than a 10 percent chance of killing everyone within a decade, a claim sxz.io covered in detail at the time. It also follows Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s own “pacing the frontier” essay, published the same week, calling on the wider industry to slow down, and a separate warning from 25 Fields Medal winners that AI labs racing to claim mathematical proofs was undermining mathematical research itself.

According to Al Jazeera, Trump’s dismissal was aimed squarely at that Anthropic warning, which he has repeatedly labeled a “hoax.” NBC News separately noted that Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton had told Congress there was “maybe a year” left to put meaningful AI regulation in place, a timeline Trump’s own post does not engage with at all.

A week of hoax rhetoric, not a one-off post

Saturday’s announcement was the culmination of a public campaign Trump had been building since the prior Monday. According to Axios, Trump used a barrage of Truth Social posts that day to recast AI safety warnings as part of what he called a “sick conspiracy,” writing that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” He carried the same message onto the stage of the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, where he called into a live interview Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was giving on stage and told the assembled executives, on speakerphone, that an AI takeover was a “hoax” and that “the robots will not be taking over.” Al Jazeera’s report on Saturday’s AI Force announcement cited that same framing five days later, tying the “hoax” label directly to Hubinger’s Anthropic warning.

Axios also reported that David Sacks, Trump’s AI adviser, has been promoting a parallel theory to his own podcast audience: that the safety warnings are being pushed by what Sacks calls a “Doomer Industrial Complex” that includes former Biden administration officials, and that the current wave of alarm amounts to a coordinated “psyop” tied to the election calendar and the rise of open-source AI. Neither Trump nor Sacks has offered evidence for either claim, and neither explains why the loudest recent warning came from inside Anthropic itself, from an employee whose job is to stress-test the company’s own models for exactly this kind of risk.

What is still unresolved

A Truth Social post is not an executive order, and nothing in Trump’s announcement creates a legal obligation for any federal agency to act. There is no named appointee, no budget, no stated reporting structure, and no public indication that the White House has even settled on whether the effort will need congressional buy-in. That leaves the AI Force, for now, as a rhetorical answer to a substantive question: what happens if the people building frontier AI systems turn out to be right about the risk. Anthropic’s own alignment lead was willing to put a number on that risk. The White House has so far offered only a name for the office that might one day have to manage it.