In a new interview, President Trump admits he’s never used an AI chatbot despite singing the tech’s praises in recent years.
“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.” Among the biggest impacts it will have is creating jobs, he says.
Llamas presses him on concerns that AI is taking jobs, at least in the short term, citing Amazon’s recent layoffs. Trump replies 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.
(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.)
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One AI-related problem Trump acknowledges is electricity shortages. AI will require “twice as much electric as we produce for the whole country, which is crazy,” Trump says.
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.
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Trump adds 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.
Trump also suggests 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, noting that some AI company CEOs are calling for more guardrails and warning that the tech could “spiral out of control,” including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. “Everything is on me as president,” Trump replies.
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