In recent weeks, a fresh crop of people connected to the artificial intelligence industry have emerged to warn that AI is possibly going to kill us all, spreading the word with various degrees of credibility or self-interest. Anthropic chief and co-founder Dario Amodei has also called to slow down the development of AI technology, a recommendation that Sam Altman of OpenAI and even notorious good judgment-haver Elon Musk quickly cosigned. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the president himself have continued to insist that AI is essential for American technological advancement and military might. As a very strange public debate has ensued, it’s become clear that Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other people connected with the administration view AI as an essentially masculine tool: “dominant,” a word they keep using over and over, powerful, and able to be kept in check only by a strong ruler.

The Trump administration has become a place where very odd politics around both gender and “wokeness” are constantly on display. Trump issued a garbled executive order immediately upon retaking office that attempted to redefine “male” and “female.” Hegseth is obsessed with testosterone, announcing in July that military members will be screened for low T regardless of their gender. The intense focus on gender and wokeness has also been true of their approach to AI: last year, the administration promised that it would require AI companies with federal contracts to make sure their large language models match the administration’s views on things like climate change; transgender identity; and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. (The administration characterized the mandate as a way to only purchase AI tools that “prioritize truthfulness and ideological neutrality.”)

Trump has turned “a debate about technology into a debate about who’s got the phallus.”

It’s now increasingly obvious that Trump and his administration view AI technology as something akin to a large, dangerous dog that only a masculine owner can control. Trump has repeatedly called warnings that AI could harm human beings “a hoax,” writing on TruthSocial that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change,’” the president also posted, with his trademark random capitalization. “That HOAX never........

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