Did ChatGPT come up with Trump’s tariff rate formula?

Update (April 3, 10:50 am UTC): This article has been updated to correct the quote attributed to Wojtek Kopczuk

There’s a crazy theory on social media that US President Donald Trump's newly announced reciprocal tariff plan — which hits all countries with a minimum 10% tariff — could have been designed by an artificial intelligence chatbot.

Only a short period after Trump announced the tariffs at the White House Rose Garden on April 2, some X users claim they were able to duplicate the same tariff plan with a rudimentary prompt using OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

“I was able to duplicate it in ChatGPT,” NFT collector DCinvestor told his 260,000 followers on X following the Donald Trump announcement of reciprocal tariffs on 185 countries on April 2. 

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

Of course, the similarities between the artificial intelligence-generated tariff plan and Trump’s plan could also be simply coincidental.

DCInvestor’s observation came in response to crypto trader Jordan Fish, also known as Cobie, who also asked ChatGPT using the prompt: “What would be an easy way to calculate the tariffs that should be imposed on other countries so that the US is on even playing fields when it comes to trade deficit. Set a minimum of 10%.” 

ChatGPT response to question on tariff calculations. Source: Cobie

Journal of Public Economics editor Wojtek Kopczuk also experimented with ChatGPT, which generated the same results. “Confirmed, chatgpt... exactly what the dumbest kid in the class would do, without edits,” he said. 

Author Krishnan Rohit postulated on X that this “might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics.” ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily, he observed. 

Founder and CEO of supply chain logistics platform Flexport, Ryan Petersen, said his firm had reverse-engineered the formula the Trump administration used to generate the reciprocal tariffs. 

An editor at The Yale Review, James Surowiecki, said something similar, “they just took our [US] trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.”

Related: ‘National emergency’ as Trump’s tariffs dent crypto prices

Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which come into effect on April 5, have hit all countries with a 10%  levy, with some nations facing even larger rates, such as China with a 34% tariff, Japan with 24%, and the European Union with 20%. 

Crypto markets reacted particularly badly, plunging 5% after the announcement as Bitcoin (BTC) fell by $5,500 to $82,277 before recovering marginally, according to CoinGecko. 

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