Donald Trump’s administration unveiled a controversial new tax strategy that economists immediately identified as relying on an extremely simplistic and perhaps impossible solution: trade deficit divided by imports.
Wednesday’s tax news included a 10 % foundation tariff on almost all goods and imposed considerably higher costs for certain countries. When explaining the country-specific rates, Trump claimed they reflected “tariffs charged to the USA” by trading partners, showing figures like 39 % for the European Union, 49 % to Cambodia and 10 % to the Heard and McDonald Islands—an Australian territory which, notably, is entirely inhabited by penguins
On social press, the strategy was immediately chastised as being financially unstable. But soon, X pundits and reporters everywhere speculated that the White House has had consulted AI bots rather than economists to ascertain its business plan.
However, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok all suggested the same method as the White House–dividing the business deficit by goods.
We verified it on ChatGPT and came up with the exact effect:
Claude went a little further and also added an “adjustment issue “—basically the 0.5x that Trump unilaterally chose to show he was being “lenient”.
Some customers asked various chatbots if this was really a screw-up. In one of the most popular relationships, Grok replied mentioning that obviously, the people at the White House didn’t really know how to apply the solution ChatGPT provided.
” The Trump administration’s group did screw up the price level analysis by using a method meant to compute the change in tariffs to support the actual price rates they claimed other countries were charging. This led to a misrepresentation of foreign tariffs and the imposition of U. S. tariffs that don’t truly reciprocate anything, as they’re based on trade deficits rather than actual tariff barriers”, it replied to a query on X. ” The error stems from both a misuse of the formula and a broader misunderstanding of trade economics”.
That said, AI enthusiasts had their fair share of fun among the chaos. Tech commentator Rohit Krishnan called this” the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics”, suggesting the White House might have simply prompted an AI system for a quick solution. Others went a step further, saying the Trump administration vibe coded a formula for tariffs, with this being the first instance of “vibe governing” in the history of humankind.
Others mentioned this was an episode of “vibe tariff” and “vibe policymaking”.
If you don’t know the reference, you can read coding-using-ai-create-apps-games” target=”_blank” class=”sc-adb616fe-0 bJsyml”>all about vibe coding here—but it basically means asking an AI chatbot to do something for you ( in this case, coding ) without you knowing what’s going on, not supervising it, and not caring about the consequences. You just vibe with it.
But to vibe govern, you also need experts, otherwise you get bad results —like this unnecessarily complex and unrealistic equation. Maybe all they needed was better prompt engineers.
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