I use AI every day, and I currently have five different assistants to choose from. I pay for Claude myself, through my Revolut Premium account I still have Perplexity for now and I also have ChatGPT. I have access to Copilot Premium and a Gemini Pro plan that comes with my cloud storage membership. I’m AI’d up to the gills.
Donald Trump has just announced on Truth Social that he is creating an AI Force to oversee AI regulation, with an AI czar to be named in the near future. I was going to paste a screenshot, but there’s some extra vitriol in there I don’t wish to amplify. He also promised not to hinder or stifle the growth of the industry, with all of this landing a day after a lawsuit was filed in California by paying subscribers of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini, who allege that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and SpaceXAI illegally agreed to slow down AI development.
My personal take is that the AI Force is another attempt, by Trump, to steer the future of AI, and to look like something is being done about public concern, without really doing anything. A slowdown, on the other hand, is exactly what AI needs.
- What is Trump's AI Force?
- Why the AI slowdown lawsuit is the wrong lens
- What Trump's AI Force means if DeepSeek or Europe pulls ahead
- The Animatrix and where AI could be heading
- Would slowing AI down affect everyday users?
- Europe is dangerously behind on AI
- Watch The AI Doc on Netflix and educate yourself
What is Trump’s AI Force?
Trump’s AI Force is a proposed body to oversee AI regulation in the US, modelled on the Space Force he created in his first term. Beyond the name and a promised czar, his post gave no detail on how it will work.
What the post did make clear is what it won’t do. Nothing will hinder or stifle the industry, and any bad behaviour can be dealt with by the existing criminal and civil justice system. This is the same man who was dismissing AI concerns as a “hoax” earlier this week. Oversight that promises not to get in the way of anything is hard to take seriously. To me it reads as an attempt to gain control of where AI goes while appearing to address the concerns of the public, and perhaps parts of the US government, without doing anything at all.
Why the AI slowdown lawsuit is the wrong lens
Treating rival AI labs agreeing to slow down as an antitrust problem is the wrong lens entirely. Having watched the AI documentary on Netflix, I see the real danger as the race itself.
The lawsuit was filed on Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. It alleges the coordination largely happened on 12 September, when Anthropic’s Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry to cooperate on decelerating advancements in favour of safety, and Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis each responded in agreement that same day. The claimants argue a slowdown reduces the value subscribers get for their money. Those are allegations at this stage.
All of these companies competing to build the best and most powerful AI is a dangerous game, because corners get cut. If they all agree to the same handicap, so to speak, we get a much safer environment for AI to develop in.
What Trump’s AI Force means if DeepSeek or Europe pulls ahead
An AI Force run by Donald Trump might suit American AI companies, but it only covers American AI companies. So what happens when DeepSeek in China starts to gain ground, or a European AI does? That’s the part that concerns me most. What Trump does, and what he expects American AI companies to do, when they aren’t the only ones in the race is a completely open question.
It’s both AI fear-mongering and genuine concern. There’s a lot of fear-mongering around AI, but there are also genuine concerns, and separating the two is difficult because we don’t know what AI will be able to do. That uncertainty is the reason to slow development, so we’re sure that what it does do is for the betterment of humanity.
There was a time when people saw the automobile as a loud, brash alternative to the perfectly fine horse, and I always come back to that when the panic starts. I also always hasten to clarify that it’s never really artificial intelligence. The chatbots we call AI are large language models, a statistical analysis of words that works out the likelihood of the next word on a certain topic in a certain context. It’s not intelligent. It’s statistics. It’s maths.
But for all the negatives, AI will bring incredible possibilities. It will hasten our ability to fight cancer, give us the power to explore the cosmos and make us a better species, as long as we don’t let it control us.
The Animatrix and where AI could be heading
I’ve referenced the Animatrix a lot recently. It’s a collection of anime shorts released in 2003 around The Matrix Reloaded, and it supplies context the original film of 1999 never clarifies. The Matrix is confusing in isolation, but the shorts, including The Second Renaissance Part I and Part II on how the war between humans and machines began, make everything make sense. Some of what it laid out back then, you’d be forgiven for saying, is on a path to the scariest parts of that collection.
Would slowing AI down affect everyday users?
Not in my case. We’ve reached a plateau where AI does nearly every task I need it to do fairly well. It gets me through my day-to-day work and has made me better at most tasks, with improved workflows and efficiencies where possible. Slowing that progress wouldn’t impact my own. What would hit hard is if you took it away from me, because that would greatly slow my ability to work. Not because I use it as a brain, but I use it for brainless work and workflows.
There are also massive gaps between these assistants in how they approach different tasks. I won’t use the same AI for one job that I’ll use for another, and some just seem significantly worse at everything than the rest. What I think will happen is that the slower ones catch up to the better ones, and an agreement like this would likely close the gap between them. ChatGPT still has the biggest share of the market, but Gemini and Claude have been closing in on it. If you’re deciding where to put your money, I’ve covered which AI subscription to pay for in Ireland.
Europe is dangerously behind on AI
Europe is in a vulnerable position on AI, and I don’t think we’re taking that seriously enough. I still see the European Union as something of a bastion of what’s right, and by right I mean correct.
But the South of Canada electing Donald Trump brought a sudden realisation that the EU depends on Visa and Mastercard, two US companies, and that goodwill was the source of financial security for the entire union, now with a volatile nation. Between them they handle the majority of card payments in the eurozone, and Ireland is one of the countries without a national card scheme of its own.
That’s abundantly visible in payments, and it’s frighteningly obvious with AI. Europe’s leading AI platform is one I’d wager 95% of the public has never heard of. It’s the French AI company Mistral AI, and to me it’s just behind everything on the market now. It isn’t short of backing, having raised €3 billion earlier this month, but still I bet most haven’t used it and won’t unless something changes. Until we can get behind an EU AI solution to the point it’s as good as the likes of Claude, we’re in a very dangerous and vulnerable position.
Watch The AI Doc on Netflix and educate yourself
My advice is to go and watch The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist on Netflix. I don’t agree with everything in it. There were things I knew before I started and things I didn’t. What every piece of content should do is take some of what you know, fill in the gaps, and reframe things you thought you understood fully, and that’s what it did for me. It’s a powerful piece of content that can do that, so sit down and watch it with your family.
Educate yourself on artificial intelligence, because the genie’s out of the lamp, the horse has bolted, and this isn’t going away. Even with Trump’s AI Force and a czar at the helm, AI is staying, and it’s people en masse who insist on change.
That’s the message I took from the documentary, that we can’t stand by and let the future of our world be dictated by AI CEOs. Nor can we stand in the middle on everything. As Ed Sheeran found out this week, when you stay in the middle, you’ve picked a side.
