President Donald Trump stepped firmly into the AI and surveillance debate this weekend, endorsing Flock Safety's license plate camera network and later dismissing artificial intelligence safety warnings as a 'hoax' during a live speakerphone call with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, Trump said he likes Flock's AI-powered cameras because they help law enforcement. He acknowledged that some people view the cameras as an infringement, but repeated 'I like them' after a reporter noted they help catch criminals. Flock operates more than 120,000 cameras across 6,000 U.S. communities and scans roughly 20 billion vehicles per month.
The comments put Trump at odds with a bipartisan pushback. Sen. Josh Hawley has opened a Senate Judiciary investigation into Flock's data practices, while Sen. Bernie Sanders is preparing legislation to rein in the camera network. Rep. Thomas Massie is pushing a bill to cut federal funding to agencies using the cameras. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to halt funding in August, and the Los Angeles Police Department suspended its Flock contract in July.
Critics have also highlighted Wired's reporting that Flock has built an AI tool called Flock OS Investigate, loaded with 69 preset prompts allowing officers to query vehicle movements and identify a car's 'associates' without capturing a name or license plate.
On Monday at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, Trump called Huang on speakerphone while Huang was onstage. In a roughly five-minute call, Trump called AI safety fears a hoax, said robots will not take over the world, and described data centers as 'the oil of the next 20, 25 years.' He told Huang, 'I'm with you all the way.' Huang agreed the U.S. can lead in AI safely and questioned the scientific basis of some safety warnings.
The exchange follows an essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urging AI companies to slow development, warning that recursive self-improvement and a recent AI agent incident made the risks too serious to ignore. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk signaled agreement, while Trump, Huang, and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg remained on the opposite side, arguing heavy rules would give China a competitive edge.
Trump later posted on Truth Social calling himself the AI 'Hoax Buster' and attacked Amodei by name. The debate rattled markets, with the PHLX Semiconductor Index falling around 6% and names including Micron, Broadcom, Lam Research, and Dell dropping sharply. Mizuho, however, called the selloff a buying opportunity and said calls to slow frontier AI are unlikely to change data center spending in any real way.
