'Lives were lost': Trump’s support of $500B AI project enrages MAGA conspiracy theorists

24 January

On the second day of his presidency, Donald Trump was joined by some prominent tech CEOs — including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Oracle's Larry Ellison and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son — during an event for the launch of the Stargate Initiative.

Trump is promoting the AI project aggressively. And according to Rolling Stone reporter Miles Klee, some conspiracy theorists in the MAGA movement fear that the president is getting involved in something sinister.

Klee, in an article published on January 24, explains, "The idea is that these companies will work together to build the data centers necessary to meet the extreme energy needs of AI, with the Trump Administration clearing regulatory roadblocks to the expansion of such technology to help the U.S. compete with China and others. The collaboration is also intended to create thousands of jobs and fuel economic growth. And while there are plenty of legitimate concerns that come with letting Silicon Valley firms off the leash to pursue bleeding-edge AI at blinding speed, the conspiracist side of Trump's coalition has particularly far-fetched notions of a worst-case scenario."

According to Klee, those MAGA conspiracists — including anti-vaxxers — are "fixated" on comments that Ellison made during the event for Stargate's launch.

"Ellison claimed that Stargate could lead to the AI-facilitated production of mRNA vaccines against cancer, explaining, 'once we gene-sequence that cancer tumor, you can then vaccinate the person, design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that cancer,'" Klee reports. "These mRNA vaccines, he speculated, could be designed 'robotically,' or by leveraging AI, 'in about 48 hours.'"

Klee notes that on X, formerly Twitter, anti-vaxxers who oppose Stargate have been making false claims about COVID-19 vaccines.

One anti-vaxxer on X claimed that "lives were lost because of the vaccines." And X user @MJTruthUltr posted, "I’m sorry… we just went through a pandemic where they used mRNA ‘vaccines’ to literally disarm immune systems."

Read the full Rolling Stone article at this link (subscription required).

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