Did ChatGPT generate Trump's tariff plan? Social media thinks so ...
Shortly after Trump’s April 2 announcement, some users claimed they could recreate the same formula using OpenAI’s ChatGPT with a simple prompt.
“I was able to duplicate it in ChatGPT,” said NFT collector DCinvestor to his 260,000 followers, noting that the chatbot even suggested the idea hadn’t been formalized before. “FFS. Trump admin is using ChatGPT to determine trade policy.”
Crypto trader Jordan Fish (Cobie) ran a similar experiment, prompting ChatGPT to calculate tariffs ensuring a “level playing field” based on the US trade deficit—the AI generated the same formula.
Even Journal of Public Economics editor Wojtek Kopczuk ran the numbers, arriving at the same conclusion. “I think they asked ChatGPT to calculate the tariffs, which is why the tariffs make absolutely no f***ing sense,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen reverse-engineered the formula used by the Trump administration, confirming: “They took the US trade deficit with each country and divided it by our imports from that country.”
The policy, set to take effect on April 5, slaps a 10% tariff on all countries while imposing harsher rates on key trading partners, including China (34%), Japan (24%), and the EU (20%).
Markets reacted sharply—Bitcoin dropped 5%, plunging US$5,500 to US$82,277 before recovering slightly, according to CoinGecko.
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