Trump's 'High IQ' AI gamble is a surrender to billionaires
By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·
When Donald Trump claims the only "guardrail" the world needs for artificial intelligence is his own "High IQ," he isn't just bragging—he's announcing a surrender.
When Donald Trump claims the only "guardrail" the world needs for artificial intelligence is his own "High IQ," he is announcing a surrender. He is handing the lives of people over to the spreadsheets of a few billionaires and the rush to ship code.
The High IQ Delusion
According to NBC News, President Trump took to Truth Social on Monday to dismiss AI safety warnings as a "SICK conspiracy." He targeted Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, who argued for slowing development to "reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong." Trump called Amodei a "perfect little angel" pretending to be altruistic while the administration "stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad... ‘things.’"
Trump views the technology as a winner-take-all prize. He insisted that "whoever wins AI wins" and that the U.S. must not "kill the Golden Goose" while sprinting against China. Trump told CNBC that the U.S. already possesses "tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power" over these companies, suggesting written laws are unnecessary because he can simply exercise his will.
This logic drove the Net Neutrality repeal in 2017—the belief that removing rules is the only way to foster "competitiveness." But when the government cuts rules, the only people who compete are those who already own the board. The costs of that innovation always land on the zip codes that cannot afford a lobbyist.
Does speed justify the risk?
The administration argues that if the U.S. regulates, China wins. House Speaker Mike Johnson warned that emergency regulation would be a "threat to every single American." This is the strongest case the right can make: that geopolitical survival depends on speed.
But a sprint toward a cliff is still a fall. When Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, he warned that these companies are "gambling with our lives" and that the technology "could kill us all by the end of the decade." Evan Hubinger of the same company said they "earnestly believe AI could kill all humans." These are not lines from a "Cold War playbook"; they are warnings from the people building the engine.
The 18th century didn't just bring steam engines; it rested on chaos. The push to produce more meant soot-choked lungs and ten-year-olds in coal mines. The state only stepped in with labor laws and safety codes after the bodies piled up. Today, a tiny elite pushes autonomous systems at breakneck speed for profit, while they treat collapsed towns and sick children as acceptable costs. Trump is not fighting a conspiracy; he is facilitating a repeat of the Industrial Revolution's darkest chapters.
Power fills the void
Vice President JD Vance called the pleas for regulation a "Trojan horse," suggesting established giants want to block new competitors. Whether the motivation is altruism or market capture, the absence of regulation creates a vacuum filled by boardrooms in San Francisco.
Unregulated data processing first manipulated ballot boxes during the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and later threatened global safety, leading leaders at the 2023 AI Safety Summit to agree that "frontier" risks required guardrails. Now, Trump wants to erase those laws. He warned that communities rejecting AI data centers will be "backwards and poor," a threat that echoes the promises made to my hometown of Flint before the factories shuttered and the water turned brown.
The path leads here: the administration will fast-track data centers by overriding local opposition and use "criminal power" to silence dissenters like Amodei. They will frame every safety concern as a gift to Beijing while the actual winners are the shareholders of OpenAI and Anthropic.
The president is betting that he can manage autonomous systems through sheer force of personality. But history shows that when the state abdicates its role as a counterweight to venture capital, the people always pay the bill. Betting the human race on one man's intuition is a gamble where we are the stakes and the billionaires are the house.