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A wild theory circulating on social media suggests that the newly announced reciprocal tariff plan by US President Donald Trump — imposing a minimum 10% tariff on all countries — may have been devised by an AI chatbot.
Shortly after Trump revealed the tariffs at the White House Rose Garden on April 2, several X users claimed they replicated the same tariff strategy using a basic prompt with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
NFT collector DCinvestor told his 260,000 followers on X that he successfully reproduced the plan using ChatGPT following Trump’s announcement of tariffs on 185 countries.
“I managed to replicate it on ChatGPT,” DCinvestor noted. "It even told me that this idea had never been established before and was something it generated. FFS. The Trump administration is using ChatGPT to shape trade policy.”
However, the resemblance between the AI-generated plan and Trump’s tariff policy could merely be coincidental.
DCInvestor’s revelation came in response to crypto trader Jordan Fish, known as Cobie, who asked ChatGPT: “What’s a simple way to calculate tariffs so the US has a level playing field regarding trade deficits? Set a minimum of 10%.”
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Wojtek Kopczuk, editor of the Journal of Public Economics, also tried the prompt with ChatGPT and received similar results. "I think the results don't make sense because they asked ChatGPT to calculate the tariffs," he said.
Author Krishnan Rohit postulated on X that this might be the first major use of AI technology in geopolitics, noting that multiple AI models, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, all produced the same answer to the tariff calculation question.
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Ryan Petersen, CEO of supply chain logistics platform Flexport, stated that his team reverse-engineered the formula used by the Trump administration.
“It’s straightforward — they took the US trade deficit with each country and divided it by imports from that country,” he explained.
James Surowiecki, editor at The Yale Review, echoed this sentiment, describing the method as simply dividing the US trade deficit with a country by that country's exports to the US.