President Donald Trump said his administration once threatened the leader of a major artificial intelligence company with jail time. He disclosed the episode on Sunday night during an appearance on "60 Minutes," hosted by Ross Douthat.

Trump said his team encountered "a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI." He did not name the individual or the company, but confirmed under Douthat's questioning that the person led "one of the big ones" in the industry.

What exactly did Trump say happened?

The president recounted the warning in unusually vivid terms.

"We called them very strongly and said, get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss goodnight," Trump said.

"We said, 'Do you like the color orange?'" he added, an apparent reference to prison attire. "We said, 'Go home right now. See your wife and children. Give them a kiss good night. Because tomorrow morning, you're going to jail.'"

Trump said the unnamed executive had "totally changed everything" after the alleged warning. He said he did not believe the conduct had been malicious, though he conceded it "coulda been malicious."

Representatives for the Trump White House and the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Why does the disclosure matter now?

The comments came during a broader "60 Minutes" discussion on whether the United States should slow the development of advanced AI. Douthat pressed Trump on public unease over data centers and on warnings from some AI leaders that the technology could pose catastrophic risks.

Trump framed his support for AI partly as a contest with China. When asked whether he would support AI-safety guardrails, he said he did not mind them, but argued the US could not place itself in "a deep second position" against Beijing.

"We're leading number one. And China has no guardrails, by the way," Trump said. He added that the US would be at an "unbelievable disadvantage" if it did not continue developing the technology.

The disclosure also lands amid an unusually close relationship between the White House and the AI industry. Trump has spent much of his second term meeting with AI leaders and extracting commitments from them.

How has Trump courted the AI industry?

The timeline of engagement is extensive:

• January 2025: Trump announced the Stargate infrastructure venture alongside OpenAI's Sam Altman, Oracle's Larry Ellison, and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son.
• March: Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI signed his White House data-center power pledge.
• September: Trump hosted a White House gathering with Google's Sundar Pichai, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI's Greg Brockman, xAI's Elon Musk, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang.

At the September gathering, the executives signed a voluntary safety accord. The accord calls for internal controls, outside evaluations, and board oversight. Trump described it as "morally binding."

The jail-time claim, set against that record of cooperation, raises the question of how far the administration will go when it judges an AI company to have crossed a line. No company has been publicly identified, and no enforcement action has been confirmed.