Did ChatGPT Design Trump's Tariff Plan?

A wild theory is making rounds on social media, claiming that U.S. President Donald Trump’s newly announced reciprocal tariff formula—imposing a minimum 10% tariff on all countries—might have been devised by an artificial intelligence chatbot.

Shortly after Trump revealed the tariffs at the White House Rose Garden on April 2, users on X (formerly Twitter) began suggesting that they could replicate the same tariff scheme using OpenAI’s ChatGPT with a basic prompt.

“I was able to duplicate it in ChatGPT,” said NFT collector DCinvestor, who shared his discovery with 260,000 followers on X after Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on 185 countries.

“It also told me that this idea hadn’t been formalized anywhere before and that it was something it came up with,” he added, implying that the chatbot independently formulated the tariff rates. “FFS. Trump’s administration is using ChatGPT to determine trade policy,” he wrote.

While the resemblance between AI-generated tariff models and Trump’s plan could be purely coincidental, some users are not convinced.

ChatGPT's Tariff Calculation Sparks Debate

DCInvestor’s findings came in response to crypto trader Jordan Fish (aka Cobie), who prompted ChatGPT with: “What would be an easy way to calculate tariffs to ensure the U.S. is on an even playing field regarding trade deficits, setting a minimum of 10%?”

Wojtek Kopczuk, editor of the Journal of Public Economics, also tested ChatGPT, which yielded the same results. “I think they asked ChatGPT to calculate tariffs, which is why the numbers make absolutely no sense,” he remarked.

Meanwhile, author Krishnan Rohit speculated that this could mark the first large-scale application of AI technology in geopolitics, noting that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok all generate the same tariff model when asked.

Trump's Tariffs Trigger Crypto Market Dip

Founder and CEO of Flexport, Ryan Petersen, claims his team reverse-engineered the Trump administration's formula, concluding that it simply takes the U.S. trade deficit with each country and divides it by U.S. imports from that nation.

Similarly, Yale Review editor James Surowiecki observed: “They just took our trade deficit with each country and divided it by the country’s exports to the U.S..”

Under the reciprocal tariff structure set to take effect on April 5, all nations face a minimum 10% tariff, while others—such as China (34%), Japan (24%), and the European Union (20%)—face steeper levies.

The crypto market reacted sharply to the news, plunging 5% following the announcement. Bitcoin BTCUSD fell $5,500 to $82,277 before staging a modest recovery, per CoinGecko.

By including relevant keywords and linking to related articles, the rewritten content aims to provide comprehensive information while enhancing search engine optimization for CryptoTelegraphs.

Join Telegram Channel For Daily New update: https://t.me/cryptotelegraphs_updates