Asked on 60 Minutes about AI executives' warnings on model safety, Trump said the danger is overstated and already under control, then told a story about threatening an AI company's leader with jail.
"I think that the risk is not nearly as real as it- as they talk, and I think the risk can be managed, and it's managed," Trump said. He claimed the Department of Justice is doing the managing. As evidence, he described a case in which "somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI." His account of the call: "We called them very strongly and said, 'Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night.'"
Trump declined to name the person or the company. He said only that it was the leader of an AI company, "One of the big ones." The excerpt available to us cuts off just as he begins describing how that executive reacted.
The anecdote is unverifiable as told. Trump gave no company, no date, no description of the alleged conduct and no law he believed had been broken. Nothing in the interview, as quoted, shows what the Justice Department did, if anything, beyond what he said on air.
There is also a tension worth noting, and it is our observation, not something Trump or the interview established. He argued that executives exaggerate the risk, yet his example is of conduct serious enough that he says an arrest was floated. Those two points are not necessarily contradictory, since a manageable risk can still involve bad actors. But the interview did not reconcile them.
The open question is whether the Justice Department will confirm the episode or leave it as a story told on television.