Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel says there is exactly one message that would get President Donald Trump to treat artificial intelligence (AI) as an emergency, and it has nothing to do with job losses, deepfakes or killer robots. In his monologue on Thursday, September 17, 2026, the ABC host offered White House staffers a shortcut: tell the president that ChatGPT is about to release the Trump-Epstein files.
The bit on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” grew out of a run of grim warnings from inside the AI industry. Trump, who is 80, has branded those concerns “a hoax” and said his administration will not change course on the technology.
“So researchers at Anthropic—one of them said he believes there was more than a 10 percent chance AI could end all human life,” Kimmel said. “But don’t worry, because President Trump has assured us that this threat to our existence is nothing more than a hoax.”
Inside the Reported White House Meetings
Pointing to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Kimmel said senior White House officials have been gathering nearly every day to work out how to get the president to put more guardrails around AI. Those officials are said to be searching for a way to make Trump heed the warnings of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Elon Musk, Trump’s ex-best friend.
The host said the effort even has a nickname. “They’re calling it ‘Operation Take Away Grandpa’s iPad,’” Kimmel joked.
“Trump’s staff has reportedly given up on trying to convince him of anything, which to me is even scarier than AI,” Kimmel said.
The Trump-Epstein Files Punchline
That is where the host pitched his own strategy. “But I think I have a way they can—and I hope they’re watching—because if you want them to take the threat of AI seriously, it’s real simple. Tell him ChatGPT is about to release the Trump-Epstein files,” Kimmel said.
The audience cheered, and Kimmel put money on the outcome. “I’ll bet a hundred bucks he’ll get Pandora’s stuff right back in that box,” he added — the suggestion being that a president who has resisted calls for AI regulation would suddenly find a way to shut the technology down.
The punchline hinged on Trump’s late friend Jeffrey Epstein, a pedophile. The two men were friendly for years, a relationship that ended sometime in the 2000s — a chapter of the president’s past that has trailed him through his second term and that late-night hosts have returned to repeatedly.
It is a familiar comedic construction: pair the abstract, hard-to-dramatize risk of machine intelligence with something far more concrete and personal. Warnings from Altman, Amodei and Musk have not moved the president, in Kimmel’s framing, so the joke supplies a threat scaled to the man rather than to the species.
One Year After the Suspension
The monologue landed on a date that carries its own weight for the program. One year earlier, on September 17, 2025, ABC pulled the show off the air, a call that reporting later traced to Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, together with Dana Walden, who co-chairs Disney Entertainment. Kimmel has said he learned of it in a phone call around 3 p.m. at the El Capitan Entertainment Centre in Hollywood, where the show tapes, with that night’s episode set to begin taping at 4:30 p.m.
The host was back at the same address, aiming a joke at the same president — this time with artificial intelligence as the subject and the White House staff as the intended audience. Kimmel’s suggested bank shot, of course, was written as a laugh line rather than a policy proposal.
Trump’s publicly stated position, meanwhile, is the one Kimmel built the entire bit around. The president has brushed aside broad calls to regulate AI in the U.S., maintained that the country needs no additional guardrails and said his administration will stay the course on the technology — leaving the aides described in that reporting to keep meeting, and the late-night host to keep offering his wager.