Anti-Vax Conspiracy Theorists Freak Out Over Trump’s $500 Billion AI Plan
President Donald Trump has said he wants the United States to be “the world capital of artificial intelligence and crypto.” On the latter front, he has so far launched and profited from his own meme coins and signed a pro-crypto executive order that did little to move markets. On AI, meanwhile, he is looking to kickstart innovation and rapidly scale up infrastructure with $500 billion in private sector investment from tech giants including OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, in a project called the Stargate Initiative.
The idea is that these companies will work together to build the data centers necessary to meet the extreme energy needs of AI, with the Trump administration clearing regulatory roadblocks to the expansion of such technology to help the U.S. compete with China and others. The collaboration is also intended to create thousands of jobs and fuel economic growth.
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And while there are plenty of legitimate concerns that come with letting Silicon Valley firms off the leash to pursue bleeding-edge AI at blinding speed, the conspiracist side of Trump’s coalition has particularly far-fetched notions of a worst-case scenario. Many of them fixated on remarks that billionaire Larry Ellison, founder and former CEO of Oracle and currently its chief technology officer, made at the White House on Tuesday. Ellison claimed that Stargate could lead to the AI-facilitated production of mRNA vaccines against cancer, explaining, “once we gene-sequence that cancer tumor, you can then vaccinate the person, design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that cancer.” These mRNA vaccines, he speculated, could be designed “robotically,” or by leveraging AI, “in about 48 hours.”
Of course, anti-vaxxers have been known to falsely claim that vaccines made with messenger RNA (mRNA) for Covid-19 are in fact harmful to the people who receive them, and even cause cancers. On X, formerly Twitter, a number of accounts that push anti-vax conspiracy theories were immediately suspicious of Ellison’s sci-fi vision. “I’m sorry… we just went through a pandemic where they used mRNA ‘vaccines’ to literally disarm immune systems,” wrote @MJTruthUltra, untruthfully. “Lives were lost because of the vaccines,” they inaccurately claimed, adding, “shove AI and the vaccines they will create up your ass.” Another conspiracist account, @Red_Pill_US, wrote: “So, did MAHA turn out to be about coalescing support for mRNA vaccines?” (MAHA, or “Make America Healthy Again,” was a slogan devised when anti-vax activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Trump; he is now Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.) The @Red_Pill_US post continued, “If Biden or Kamala told you to get vaccinated, you wouldn’t do it. Yet, now Trump is steering you in that direction again, and it’s somehow different?” Collectively, the two misinformation accounts have more than 700,000 followers.
These reactions recalled the cognitive dissonance of 2020, when some of Trump’s fiercest supporters rejected his endorsement of the Covid-19 vaccines and the public-private initiative Operation Warp Speed, launched by his first administration to accelerate the development of these drugs. Among various popular videos on the right-wing streaming site Rumble this week are clips denouncing Stargate as “WARP SPEED 2.0 On Steroids!” and warning that it “Could Unleash An ‘Extinction Event’!” A recent episode of prominent anti-vaxxer Del Bigtree’s show on the site is titled “STARGATE TO HELL?” Members of the QAnon message board GreatAwakening.win were no less perturbed, and wondered why their president would be on board with Ellison’s proclamations. “Why would [Ellison] promote/be involved in this?” wrote one in reply to a clip of the Oracle exec. Makes me question Trump and his motives.” Another warned, “Protect your DNA!!!! Cancer will be a thing of the past in 2 years but because of Ivermectin and other parasitic drugs.” (Ivermectin has been incorrectly touted by anti-vaxxers as an effective Covid-19 treatment; it has not been shown to prevent cancer.)
Another conspiracy theorist attacking the Stargate deal is a Trump megadonor and top advisor Elon Musk. But Musk’s criticism came by way of his vendetta against Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, whom he often attacks as the company — which Musk co-founded — began to transition from its nonprofit origins to a for-profit model. (Musk resigned from OpenAI’s board in 2018, and his companies Tesla and xAI are competitors.) The billionaire claimed on X that OpenAI and its partners “don’t actually have the money” to spend on Stargate, at another point calling the project “fake.” Altman has protested that the infrastructure plan is going forward and will be good for the country, while some of the Trump camp are reportedly “furious” about Musk undercutting it.
Perhaps the most grounded objections to Stargate from the far right referenced the likelihood of AI-enabled mass surveillance. The privacy threats posed by artificial intelligence are very real, and it’s understandable for people to distrust a government that has long spied on them; Ellison’s comments only months ago about AI monitoring systems that could ensure “citizens will be on their best behavior” certainly fueled this week’s predictions — from across the political spectrum — of a dystopia in which the state tracks our every move.
Yet even this frighteningly plausible outcome was not extreme enough for the hardcore conspiracists, who had to draw other connections. “Why reuse the name Stargate Project — the same as the secret Cold War program on remote viewing?” asked the author of @ShayUnleashed, yet another verified misinformation account on X, referring to formerly secret U.S. Army research on supposed psychic phenomena in the 1970s and 1980s. “Is this symbolism of AI being used as mass surveillance?” they continued. “We know they do it now, but how deep will this go… Coincidence? There are none.”
You certainly don’t need to delve into the realm of the paranormal to be worried about how AI might reshape society, but, unfortunately, that’s where a segment of Trump supporters live. It could remain a problem for him as he aims to turbocharge American industry while ensuring his all-important allies in Silicon Valley get everything they want. Conversely, it may force his loyalists to explain how his proximity to these powerful oligarchs is somehow not a sign of his corruptible nature. In any event, the awkward tensions arising from Trump’s ties to big tech in his second term as president aren’t going away — and who knows what drama they’ll bring in his second week back on the job.
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