Donald Trump turned a White House event featuring some of the biggest names in technology into another confrontation with CNN Tuesday when he abruptly interrupted correspondent Kristen Holmes and attacked her network before she could finish pressing the group on AI safety.
The moment came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei discussed both the enormous potential of artificial intelligence and the risks that come with the rapidly developing technology.
Holmes then tried to follow up with a straightforward question.
“Do you think that self-policing is enough?”
Trump jumped in.
“Hold it, hold it,” he said.
Then he turned the exchange into an attack on CNN.
“CNN, fake news. She’s fake news.”
Holmes did not immediately back down.
She repeated her question about whether allowing the technology industry to police itself would really be sufficient.
Trump responded with another two words:
“The worst.”
And the reaction behind him was difficult to miss.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg could be seen smiling during the exchange, while Mediaite reported that several others standing alongside Trump could also be seen or heard laughing.
Trump then moved away from Holmes’ question and returned to the tech executives surrounding him.
The setting made the confrontation particularly striking.
Trump had just hosted a high-profile White House gathering that brought together an extraordinary collection of technology executives, including Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Amodei and OpenAI President Greg Brockman.
The administration was promoting a new voluntary framework for AI safety in which technology companies would assume substantial responsibility for monitoring themselves.
That was precisely the issue Holmes was attempting to question.
Rather than simply answering whether self-policing was sufficient, Trump first stopped the CNN correspondent and attacked both her and her network.
The question itself did not disappear.
Concerns remain over how much responsibility technology companies should have for policing increasingly powerful AI systems and what role the federal government should play in enforcing safeguards.
But for a few remarkable seconds outside the White House, that policy debate took a back seat.
A CNN reporter asked whether the industry could really police itself.
And before she could get much further, the president of the United States was calling her “fake news” and “the worst.”
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