In a new interview, President Trump admits he’s never used a chatbot despite singing the tech’s praises in recent years and routinely posting AI-generated content to his personal social media feeds—including one particularly racist clip that caused a firestorm on Friday.
“Have you ever used ChatGPT or Claude?” NBC News’ Tom Llamas asked the president in a recent White House sit-down.
“I haven’t really, but I know all about it,” Trump replies. Then, he insists, “AI is a big deal. It’s going to be maybe the biggest thing. Bigger than the internet, bigger than anything else.”
However, while the president claims he has not personally tinkered with chatbots, his Truth Social feed is full of AI-generated images and clips. Early this morning, he posted a one-minute video that depicted former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as monkeys, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
When questioned about it, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt initially called it “fake outrage,” The New York Times reports, but the post was later deleted following uproar from prominent GOP supporters. A White House source blamed a “staffer” for posting it.
It’s part of a pattern, however. Last month, Trump posted an AI-generated image of him planting a US flag on Greenland. In May, he posted an AI-generated image of himself as the pope, offending Catholics. Even Melania Trump used AI to deepfake her voice for her audiobook.
And on the campaign trail in 2024, the president was among the first prominent politicians to start posting AI-generated content, such as an AI photo of Kamala Harris that depicted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as a communist event.
Trump’s process for posting on Truth Social is unclear. He has dictated tweets to staffers in the past, The Washington Post reports. But according to the paper, he also posts himself, “surprising his staff in the middle of the night and early in the morning.”
(Credit: Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
He does not use computers or email, but he’s been photographed with his phone many times. Given his chummy relationship with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, it’s a bit surprising to hear he’s never used his product.
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Trump’s relaxed attitude about AI content appears to have influenced the agencies he oversees. Last month, the White House posted an altered photo of a woman arrested after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protest, changing her face from neutral to sobbing, The Guardian reports. It echoes a March 2025 Studio Ghibli-style AI image of an immigrant woman crying that the White House posted last year.
In the NBC News interview, Trump suggested he would be responsible for any ill effects of AI. “If AI affects humanity in a negative way, is that on you?” Llamas asks him. “Everything is on me as president,” Trump replies.
AI As the ‘Greatest Producer’ of Jobs
Llamas also pressed Trump on concerns that AI is taking jobs, at least in the short term, citing Amazon’s recent layoffs. Trump replied that AI will be the “greatest producer” of jobs, highlighting the military and medical industries as beneficiaries, and adds that more Americans are working now than at any time in US history.
Fact check: The president is correct, mostly due to population growth, but job creation has slowed sharply since he took office. Excluding recessions, 2025 was the worst year for job creation since 2003, with 584,000 jobs created, down from more than 2 million in both 2024 and 2023. Wage growth is also steadily slowing, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by NBC News.
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(In an October layoff memo, an Amazon exec said, “AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.” CEO Andy Jassy later argued that the decision was due to “culture,” not AI.)
One AI-related problem Trump acknowledged is electricity shortages. AI will require “twice as much electric as we produce for the whole country, which is crazy,” Trump said.
The energy needs of AI data centers vastly exceed what the US currently produces, which has already increased prices for Americans, kicked off projects to upgrade the grid (sometimes through eminent domain), and led to a flurry of executive orders to slash red tape on permitting.
Trump added that he “came up with a concept [in which] each building that is built is going to generate their own electricity. They’re going to build their own electric plant.” He didn’t elaborate, but last month he called on technology companies to pay for the extra energy their data centers consume; Microsoft has agreed to do that.
Earlier this week, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary predicted that “half the data center announcements you’ve heard of are never going to get built [because] there’s no power left on the grid.” It’s one of the reasons Silicon Valley is exploring data centers in space. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently asked the FCC for permission to build an orbital data center with a staggering one million satellites, even though there are only 14,500+ satellites in orbit now.
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