Kamala Harris posted a lengthy statement Monday urging President Trump to pursue a treaty with countries like China to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development. The response online was swift, and it wasn’t about the policy.
Social media users dug up a 2023 clip of Harris, who served as the Biden administration’s AI czar, attempting to explain the technology while she was vice president.
“I think the first part of this issue that should be articulated is AI is kind of a fancy thing,” Harris said in the resurfaced clip. “First of all, it’s two letters. It means artificial intelligence, but ultimately what it is is it’s about machine learning.”
She continued: “And so, the machine is taught — and part of the issue here is what information is going into the machine that will then determine — and we can predict then, if we think about what information is going in, what then will be produced in terms of decisions and opinions that may be made through that process.”
“So,” she added, “to reduce it down to its most simple point, this is part of the issue that we have here is thinking about what is going into a decision, and then whether that decision is actually legitimate and reflective of the needs and the life experiences of all the people.”
Conservative influencer “Western Lensman” reposted the clip alongside Harris’s new statement, writing, “Kamala Harris on AI when it’s not a written statement crafted by a team of consultants.”
National security and global economics expert Kyle Bass questioned whether Harris wrote the Monday post herself: “There’s not a chance in hell Kamala wrote this. Have you ever heard her say ‘frontier,’ ‘advancing,’ and ‘intelligence’ in the same sentence? Until now, her misfits had never produced anything this un-Kamala and then posted it on social media.”
Columnist S.L. Kanthan called Harris “one of the dumbest women” now asking America to “voluntarily slow down progress in AI,” and circulated a separate old clip of Harris describing cloud storage: “No longer are you necessarily keeping those private files in some file cabinet that’s locked in the basement of the house. It’s on your laptop, and it’s then, therefore, up here in this cloud, that exists above us, right?”
Author and national security expert Sarah Adams wrote, “No one is looking for your thoughts on ‘intelligence.'” Influencer Andrew Aziz and others suggested Harris’s own AI statement had itself been generated by artificial intelligence.
What Harris actually proposed
In her post, Harris wrote that AI is “advancing at an alarming speed” and pointed to what she described as industry leaders’ calls to “responsibly slow the pace of frontier AI development.” She argued a slowdown is “critical in order to ensure AI serves the public interest,” adding that pacing development “does not mean giving up on this technology’s potential to produce life-saving benefits in fields like medicine” but rather setting “sensible guardrails so that AI does not completely escape human control and endanger our safety and collective future.”
She called on Congress to “work at an urgent pace” on AI oversight while insisting “the United States must continue to lead the world in developing AI technology even as we seek to impose common-sense safety standards.”
Democrats vs. Trump on AI
Harris isn’t alone among Democrats pushing this line. Former President Barack Obama told a private fundraiser in New York City last Thursday that Democrats should place AI near the center of their agenda ahead of the midterms and 2028, warning the technology “can be dangerous” without oversight while also calling it potentially beneficial for drug development and clean energy.
“This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous,” Obama said. “If we do get on top of it, I do think it’s beneficial.”
Trump rejected the push for new restrictions in a Monday Truth Social post: “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!” He alleged “a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” adding, “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so.”
