Trump says an AI chief was told to get ready for jail. He won't say who, or why

The interview was taped at the White House on Friday and aired on CBS's 60 Minutes on Sunday, November 8. Ross Douthat, the correspondent, went through immigration, Iran, corruption and the president's own mortality. Artificial intelligence got a stretch of its own, and most of it went the way you would expect.

"You are an AI bull," Douthat said.

"I am," Trump answered.

Then, according to the Indian news agency ANI and the financial site TipRanks, the president told a story that nobody running an AI company will have heard as a joke.

"Get ready to go to jail"

"We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI," Trump said, as quoted by ANI. What came next, in his telling, was a phone call. "We called them very strongly and said, 'Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night.'" ANI and TipRanks carry that line in the same words.

It worked, he said. The person "totally changed everything."

That is close to the whole story. Trump did not name the executive. TipRanks quotes him describing the company as "one of the big ones." He did not say what the bad thing was, when the call happened, or whether any charge was ever drafted. Both outlets say the Justice Department was the agency involved, but in their own words. Neither quotes Trump naming it. The written transcript CBS posted online does not include the exchange; ANI and TipRanks both report it from the interview.

TipRanks says the White House, the Justice Department and Anthropic have not confirmed who he meant. That last name is there for a reason.

Guessing the name

TipRanks went further and asked whether the target was Dario Amodei, Anthropic's chief executive. Its case is circumstantial. It points to a Politico report from September saying Trump told staff he wanted to send people at the company to jail, and to a Truth Social post in which he wrote "Dario (Anthropic!)". It also says plainly that Amodei has not been accused of any crime and that there is no proof the Justice Department ever threatened to arrest him. So treat the name as a guess. Trump never said it.

Whoever it was, the mechanics are what should bother people. The president of the United States described, on national television, a threat of prosecution used to make a private company change course. No charge. No public allegation. No name. If the person broke the law, there is a process for that, and it does not end with a phone call and a change of heart. If they did not, then the threat was the policy.

It also tells every other AI executive how the relationship works. Nobody needs to see a subpoena to get the message. They only need to watch Sunday night television.

Guardrails, within reason

The rest of the AI segment was more familiar. Douthat raised the warnings from AI industry leaders that the technology could kill huge numbers of people. Trump brushed them aside. He said the risk was "not nearly as real" as those leaders make out. "And I think the risk can be managed."

His reason for pushing ahead was China. He said Xi Jinping is "all in to SI, as I call it," and explained the rename: "it's a much better name I think, 'cause it's not artificial." When Douthat summed it up as a race with China, Trump agreed that whoever wins that race wins.

Asked whether he would work with Democrats on AI safety, he said yes. Then came the caveat. "I don't mind guardrails. But I don't wanna put us in a deep second position." And: "We're leading number one. And China has no guardrails, by the way."

Douthat pointed out that China does have one guardrail, which is being a totalitarian state. Trump's reply was the most revealing line of the night: "With me, it's pretty strong, but it's not quite that strong."

Put the two halves of the segment side by side. The stated policy is light rules, a race with Beijing and a promise that the risk can be managed. The practice, by the president's own account, sometimes looks like a call telling an executive to go home and say goodnight to the family.

Sources: CBS News, 60 Minutes transcript, The Tribune (ANI), TipRanks.