What voters want on AI from Trump

The Artificial Intelligence Polling Institute asked nearly 1,000 respondents to rate the sometimes conflicting views that Trump allies and the man himself have expressed on AI. What they found might give pause to open-source acolytes and out-there accelerationists alike — and, perhaps unexpectedly, to the Republicans who are ready to line up behind Trump’s desire to repeal President Joe Biden’s sweeping AI agenda. Respondents have serious concerns about the safety of the technology itself. That’s a top Biden-Harris priority that Trump has been downplaying. They’re also majorly worried about keeping the most advanced forms of AI out of the Chinese government’s hands, which seems like a more potentially bipartisan political project. Asked whether Trump in a second term should prioritize keeping the U.S. ahead of China on AI or keeping Americans safe from it, they prioritized safety by a margin of 15 points. But when asked a slightly different version of the question that presented the argument as a choice between more-secure models that protect against Chinese competition, and less-secure models that might protect free speech — the latter a priority articulated by vice presidential candidate JD Vance) — they clearly worried much more about China. In fact they favored keeping advanced AI from China by a much larger margin of 43 points in that case, suggesting that the “free speech” arguments for open-source AI on the cultural right aren’t widely shared.