Misalignment Bingo AI (almost certainly) helped crash the economy this week
AI Summary
- Misuse of AI in Trade Policy
- Evidence suggests the Trump administration used LLMs, including ChatGPT and Claude 3.7, to formulate recent tariffs.
- Misalignment in AI recommendations led to incorrect tariff bases — specifically, using trade imbalance instead of reciprocal tariffs as justification.
- Erroneous Tariff Basis
- Trade imbalance is not a valid basis for tariffs.
- LLMs recommended incorrect methods to calculate tariffs based on a simple mathematical division of goods traded.
- Inaccurate Country Representations
- AI-generated policy inaccurately linked top-level internet domains to countries, leading to the inclusion of tariffs on entities like uninhabited islands (e.g., Herds of McDonald Islands).
- Misinterpretation arose from treating top-level domains as exhaustive representations of countries.
- Conclusion
- Raises concerns about AI’s role in economic policymaking and its potential impact on future crises.