Trump’s striking the right balance for ensuring AI safety — and success

Amid a constant flood of “AI horror” stories, it’s good to see President Donald Trump and his team fighting back with reassurances about the tech and existing laws for controlling it.

This week’s claims that McDonald’s is using AI in a devious scheme to extract every last penny from customers via “dynamic pricing” algorithms working secretly collected data sure sounded ominous — but, even setting aside the company’s denials, the real issues there aren’t AI but data-collection and dynamic pricing, both issues that predate AI.

At least the McDonald’s report was specific, unlike the recent rash of vague fearmongering (some of it from tech CEOs!) about AI breaking out of control, putting the whole human race at risk.

Trump is fighting back: Not only does he consistently tout AI’s importance and reject calls to slow its development, this week his administration rolled out tangible examples of how it can improve regular folks lives, including the federal-government interface America.gov.

Along with that came Tuesday’s show where the top platforms’ leaders agreed to regulate themselves and ensure their products are safe — followed by Wednesday’s Post scoop on how the Federal Trade Commission is now ramping up a major probe of Anthropic, OpenAI and other “frontier” labs to ensure their tools pose no dangers.

That is: Team Trump isn’t just trusting Sam Altman & Co. to do the right thing.

This tech is already starting to deliver world-changing benefits in medicine and other fields, and should be a huge economy-wide boost in the near future; it’s already driving US economic growth.

Trump is right to prioritize the AI race with China and look skeptically at “AI safety” proposals that are more about protecting industry’s current leaders.

He’s also correct to want companies to ensure their products are safe: “I’m not going to stifle growth of something” that may be “bigger than the Industrial Revolution,” he declared, but he also promised to “be very careful” about moving forward.

Under the deal to self-regulate, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, XAI and Nvidia agreed to:

• Install “robust internal controls” to monitor their products;

• Have “an internal team” monitor those controls and ensure products operate as intended;

• Employ an “independent” auditor to assess the protocols and operations; and

• Create an “independent committee” to review reports and ensure any issues are “remediated.”

The agreement also acknowledges “it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations” at some point.

But the prez rightly notes the country already has regulators: prosecutors, courts, the Federal Trade Commission, etc. — viz. that expanding FTC probe.

“We need to win” the AI race, an FTC official explained, while the Democratic Party “wants to surrender to our enemies” — and though “people talk about how we need new laws,” in fact “we have plenty of laws in the books.”

Most Americans know the tech is powerful and new —  but don’t know much more about it, so fearmongering is easy.

Team Trump has its eye firmly on protecting the future with its focus on winning the AI race while also giving the public solid reason to believe the tech and the tech firms are under control.