Does the Trump administration use AI to calculate tariffs?

With the world talking about Trump’s tariffs – you know, there will be taxes that will basically be imposed globally on a global scale and make your iPhone more expensive – an important question looms: Is the Trump administration using AI to calculate these tariffs?

This is unheard of. Trump’s “reciprocity tariff” table, although certainly not certain at the moment, is probably the most important document of the decade. But the numbers on the table indicate Tomfoolery.

In every specific country’s tariffs, although Trump calls them, these tariffs are not the countdown. It seems that the White House has used a very basic formula to divide the U.S. trade deficit into a country, then divide it by the total import from that country, and then divide the result into two. Note that there are no actual tariffs in this formula; a country may impose tariffs on U.S. imports, but the formula ignores them (the White House basically provides more evidence that it is true, which is the case with financial writer James Surowiecki).

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Then there are issues with countries and regions including places where there is no one (that’s why the penguin memes flood the internet).

Tech artist Gordon Chapman then put a bombshell on the thread, indicating that the White House tariff table corresponds to the top-level domain of the internet (rather than the actual country), which could prove that it was generated by AI. Chapman later quit the post explaining that the tariff sheet may be based on this data.

Who did math?

Still, the question remains: If the whole thing is just a simple formula applied to a list of territories that are not entirely related to where the United States should reasonably impose tariffs, then what is the (human) idea of ​​(human) idea calculation?

According to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) economists have been studying these things for years. Every Reuters, some experts believe that the “no way” of tariffs will produce “nonsense”.

Interestingly, if you ask LLMs like Chatgpt to calculate our tariffs on other countries in a “simple way”, you’ll get the same formula as the one used by the White House. Ouch.

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What happened next is unclear

Tariff numbers can be seen as the starting point for further negotiations. In fact, Eric Trump frankly said on X: “I don’t want to be the last country to try to have a trade deal with @realdonaldtrump. The first negotiation will win – the last life will definitely be lost. I’ve seen this movie all my life…”, he wrote. So if all numbers will change very quickly, the mathematics behind the numbers is not important either.

But if AI rushes to do tariff calculations, it would show that the Trump administration’s new depth is powerless, following the use of signal chats to plan military operations and include a reporter in the same chat.

It’s hard to prove that the White House uses Chatgpt or equivalent tariff math. AIS itself gives quite a few warnings that their calculations are imperfect and simplified, which should be paused to anyone. But these signs are there, and we trembled about what the White House experts can leave to AI to do.