US President Donald Trump said law enforcement should be the principal check on AI abuses, while opposing industry regulation and urging faster domestic data centre expansion, in a Time interview published on 1 October, Anadolu reported. He identified the Department of Justice and the FBI as the agencies he would rely on if companies behaved badly.
Key points
- Trump called the Justice Department and FBI his guardrails against AI abuses.
- He argued that government regulation could put US technology firms out of business.
- He pressed municipalities to accept data centres and objected to US companies building major facilities abroad.
Trump names DOJ and FBI as guardrails
“If they do bad things, I have a DOJ, I have an FBI. That’s your guardrail over here,” Trump said. His preferred check depends on agencies investigating misconduct rather than rules imposed on the industry in advance. He warned that government rules could drive US technology firms out of business and said companies should oversee their own behaviour. He acknowledged potential downsides in what he called a “whole new world”, but argued against measures he believed would damage the sector.
“I don’t have to destroy the industry. We’re making a lot of money with that industry,” he said. Trump also described a dinner with Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei. He said Amodei’s views were “much different” from their portrayal in the media and only “a little bit different” from his own.
Trump previously rejected an international agreement to manage AI risks. In the Time interview, he named the domestic agencies he considers a guardrail and argued that companies should govern their own conduct before any abuse calls for an investigation.
Municipalities face Trump’s data centre warning
Trump urged municipalities to allow data centres, warning that communities rejecting them would lose jobs and money and face crime and deteriorating conditions, Anadolu reported. He maintained that the facilities bring wealth to municipalities and ease the burden on households. His warning cast local decisions about whether to host computing infrastructure in economic terms, alongside his argument for faster construction across the United States.
He also objected to American technology companies putting large facilities overseas. Trump singled out a Google facility in Finland, saying he was “not happy about that”, and criticised European efforts to attract projects that might otherwise be built in the US.
China shapes Trump’s case for US capacity
Trump framed domestic data centre construction as a national security matter, warning that US hesitation would surrender computing capacity to rivals. “If we don’t build them, they’ll be built someplace else,” he said. Pointing to China, he argued that Beijing wanted the data centres the US might fail to build: “I don’t want China to have all these data centers.”
