Donald Trump during an interview with the New York Post’s Miranda Devine at Turnberry, Scotland, in July 2025. Illustrative: not the 60 Minutes interview. Image: The White House (Daniel Torok) / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain, cropped
President Donald Trump says his Justice Department warned the leader of “one of the big” AI companies to get ready for prison, according to the full transcript of his interview with Ross Douthat for CBS’s 60 Minutes, aired on Sunday. In the same answer he said “I don’t mind guardrails” on AI, and that he would work with Democrats on AI safety.
The interview was mostly about Republicans’ heavy losses in last week’s midterm elections. Douthat turned to AI by pointing out that Americans “don’t love data centers” and are “pretty negative” about the technology, something polls have shown for months and voters made clear at the ballot box.
“Get ready to go to jail”
Douthat asked why Trump wasn’t worried by the doom warnings from the people building AI, some of whom put the chance of disaster at more than 10%, as Anthropic’s alignment lead did in September. Trump said the risk is “not nearly as real as … they talk” and “can be managed”, by the Justice Department. He then told a story:
We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said, ‘Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night.’
Donald Trump, to 60 Minutes
He said he couldn’t name the person or the company. Asked whether it was the leader of a major AI company, he said: “One of the big ones. Yeah.” According to Trump, the warning worked: the person “totally changed everything” and replied, “Yes, sir.” He added: “I don’t think it was done maliciously. But it coulda been malicious.”
Trump gave no date and didn’t say what the person was supposed to have done, so the claim can’t be checked. It echoes what he told TIME in early October, when he called the Justice Department and the FBI his “guardrail” for the AI labs and said he had “used it twice”. The Justice Department hasn’t commented on the new remarks.
“I don’t mind guardrails”
Douthat then asked whether Trump would work with Democrats if they wanted to put that kind of oversight into law. “I would absolutely,” Trump said, before setting out a condition:
I don’t mind guardrails. But I don’t wanna put us in a deep second position. We’re leading number one. And China has no guardrails, by the way.
Donald Trump, to 60 Minutes
When Douthat said China has “the guardrails of being a totalitarian state”, Trump said whatever President Xi Jinping “says goes”, adding: “With me, it’s pretty strong, but it’s not quite that strong.” He also said the government has “very brilliant people watching every one of these companies”, without saying who they are.
The race with China still comes first
Trump made clear that China is why he isn’t slowing down. “If we don’t have it, China’s gonna have it,” he said. “That would put us at an unbelievable disadvantage. It’s all between us and China.” He said China is “now one year behind us”, and that Xi, who he said visited two weeks ago, had praised the US effort. He again called the technology “SI”, for super intelligence, because “it’s not artificial”.
The tone is softer than in September, when Trump answered calls from AI bosses to slow down by calling the fears a “HOAX” and writing that AI needed no new guardrails, only “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT”, as we looked at then. Since then his administration has relied on a voluntary, “morally binding” pact with AI companies, while Ted Cruz blocked a Democratic bill for mandatory safety rules in the Senate. Trump didn’t say what guardrails he would accept, and no bill or order came with the interview.
Why it matters
With Democrats stronger after the midterms, Trump’s “I would absolutely” suggests he might sign AI safety rules into law, but only if they don’t slow the race with China. His story about threatening an AI chief with jail also shows how he prefers to police the industry: through prosecutors, not regulators.
Sources: CBS News, 60 Minutes (full transcript of Ross Douthat’s interview with President Trump); TIME (Oct 1 interview transcript)
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