Did Trump Use ChatGPT to Determine Disastrous New Tariffs?

Following President Trump’s announcement of sweeping global tariffs on Wednesday, users on social media were quick to try and decipher the math behind the tariffs. On top of a baseline 10% tariff against the entire world, individual countries will face additional tariffs based on how “unfairly” Trump believes they are treating the U.S. It turns out, however, that the White House may have used rudimentary suggestions from a chatbot to come to its calculations.

From The Verge:

Economist James Surowiecki quickly reverse-engineered a possible explanation for the tariff pricing. He found you could recreate each of the White House’s numbers by simply taking a given country’s trade deficit with the US and dividing it by their total exports to the US. Halve that number, and you get a ready-to-use “discounted reciprocal tariff.” The White House objected to this claim and published the formula it says that it used, but as Politico points out, the formula looks like a dressed-up version of Surowiecki’s method.

Asking various chatbots for a “simple” way to rectify trade imbalances with other countries, The Verge found that they all suggested a formula that aligns closely with the one used by The White House.

That should not be terribly surprising to anyone who understands the fundamentals of chatbots. They are imitating what they frequently see posted online. The trick to understanding chatbots is to preface anything they say with, “I have heard a lot of people are saying that…” But in the same way that you would not trust a survey of fifty people who do not know anything about a subject, you should not trust what a chatbot says either. They confidently say things that are wrong or confounding all the time.

Although the administration has denied using a basic chatbot over experienced economists, it has already gotten itself into hot water over its penchant for using consumer apps. It just went through a scandal for prolifically using the consumer app Signal to discuss confidential war plans, a move that seems likely to have been influenced by Elon Musk, who is known for using Signal. And his DOGE cost-cutting initiative has been forthright in its plans to use AI across the federal government in order to cut costs.

Further supporting the idea that the White House haphazardly put together its tariff strategy is the fact that there are territories on the list that are uninhabited, like Heard Island. And other countries being hit with tariffs, like Australia, in fact, have a surplus with the United States, meaning they buy more from the United States than they export. You have to wonder if they even read the tariff list before sharing it.

There are perfectly good reasons why a country might have a trade deficit with another. The United States is a service economy—it does the lucrative work of designing products, developing software, managing supply chains, and other work while outsourcing the physically laborious work to other nations. The U.S. has a trade surplus in services as countries use many American services, from Facebook to Netflix. Every country has what economists call a comparative advantage, something they do well that other countries do not.

Americans, put simply, do not want to do the grunt work, so the country imports a lot of goods from countries that will do it. Somehow, the president expects factories are suddenly going to come roaring back, and deporting migrants will not make lettuce more expensive.

The Penguin on Heard Island after hearing the tariff news pic.twitter.com/DIFBvDFWAO

— High Yield Harry (@HighyieldHarry) April 3, 2025