Source: Cointelegraph Original: "{title}"
A crazy theory has emerged on social media claiming that U.S. President Trump's newly announced reciprocal tariff plan—imposing at least a 10% tariff on all countries—may have been designed by an AI chatbot.
Shortly after Trump announced this tariff policy in the White House Rose Garden on April 2, some X users claimed they could generate the same tariff scheme in OpenAI's ChatGPT with just simple prompts.
"I replicated it in ChatGPT," NFT collector DCinvestor told his 260,000 followers on X after Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on 185 countries.
"ChatGPT also told me that this idea had never been formally proposed before; it came up with it on its own," DCinvestor added, referring to the chatbot's ability to calculate tariff rates. "Oh my, the Trump administration actually used ChatGPT to formulate trade policy."
Of course, the AI-generated tariff scheme is highly similar to Trump's policy, which could also just be a coincidence.
DCinvestor's discovery was in response to crypto trader Jordan Fish (online name Cobie), who had entered the prompt in ChatGPT: "How to easily calculate tariffs to be imposed on other countries to ensure the U.S. is in a fair competitive environment regarding trade deficits? Set the minimum tariff at 10%."
ChatGPT's response to the tariff calculation question. Source: Cobie
Wojtek Kopczuk, editor of the Journal of Public Economics, also experimented with ChatGPT, yielding similar results to others. "I think they asked ChatGPT to calculate tariffs for other countries, which is why these tariffs make absolutely no sense," he said.
Author Krishnan Rohit speculated on X that this might be the first large-scale application of AI technology in geopolitics. He noted that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok provided the same answers on how to easily impose tariffs.
Trump's reciprocal tariffs led to a drop in cryptocurrency.
Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of supply chain logistics platform Flexport, stated that his company reverse-engineered the formula used by the Trump administration to generate reciprocal tariffs. "It's actually quite simple; they divided the U.S. trade deficit with each country by the goods we import from that country."
James Surowiecki, editor of The Yale Review, expressed a similar view: "They simply divided our (the U.S.) trade deficit with that country by the country's exports to us."
Trump's reciprocal tariffs will take effect on April 5, imposing a 10% tariff on all countries, with some countries facing higher rates, such as China at 34%, Japan at 24%, and the European Union at 20%.
The crypto market reacted particularly strongly, with Bitcoin (BTC) dropping 5% after the announcement, falling to $82,277, a decline of $5,500, before slightly rebounding, according to CoinGecko data.
Related: Bitcoin supporters speculate that "massive" bot spam briefly caused the Bitcoin mailing list to crash.
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