Trump floated possible stakes in frontier AI labs (OpenAI or Anthropic)

President Donald Trump used a White House interview with TIME on Sept. 28 to talk up the AI boom — and to make clear he sees the whole thing through a very Trump-shaped lens: winners, money, leverage, and not much patience for regulation that might slow the party down.

He said he had just spent more than two hours over dinner with Dario, after delaying the meeting because of the Presidents Cup in Chicago, and described him as “very smart” and “maybe different than I thought.” Trump also said Dario was coming back for another meeting the next day, alongside “everybody” else in the AI orbit. Asked what’s behind all these sit-downs, he answered in business terms, not policy terms. AI, in his telling, is a vast new industry bringing “trillions of dollars” into the United States.

That framing matters because Trump paired his enthusiasm with a warning. If AI companies chase regulation, he said, “they can put you out of business.” He also argued that the field is unlike anything people have seen before, “probably mostly good, but some bad too,” with major promise in medicine and a need for companies to “behave for themselves.” It’s not the language of a hands-off libertarian. It’s the language of a president who wants the boom, wants to be in the room, and wants everyone else to know he can be the person deciding how close the room door stays shut.

The interview, presented as a lightly edited transcript, never spells out a specific deal or investment. But Trump’s remarks around AI were blunt enough to make the larger direction obvious: he’s not treating frontier AI as a niche tech policy fight. He’s treating it like one more arena where the United States should be winning big, and where the people building the machines should expect the government to be at least part of the deal.