Trump Says He 'Likes' Flock Surveillance Cameras Amid Bipartisan Pushback

President Donald Trump said Sunday he likes Flock Safety's AI-powered surveillance cameras, ending months of hedging on a technology that has split lawmakers in both parties.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One as he flew back from Ireland to Joint Base Andrews, Trump was asked whether he would back the automated license plate readers that police departments credit with cracking cases nationwide. "Yeah, I sort of like them because of that, because of law enforcement," he said.

Trump didn't stop there. He conceded that not everyone agrees, noting that "some people" consider the cameras "an infringement" on privacy. When a reporter pushed back, pointing out that Flock's network "helps catch a lot of criminals," Trump doubled down: "I like them."

Flock's pitch is simple: fixed cameras on poles photograph passing vehicles and use computer vision to log make, model, color, and identifiable features like bumper stickers and roof racks. The company has installed more than 120,000 cameras across more than 6,000 U.S. communities, scanning roughly 20 billion vehicles a month.

Police say the searchable network helps recover stolen cars and locate missing people—critics say it also builds a movement log on people who've never been suspected of a crime.

That tension deepened last month, when Wired revealed that Flock has been building an AI tool that can identify and track drivers without ever capturing a name or a license plate. The software, first called Nightshift and now rebranded Flock OS Investigate, was found loaded with 69 preset prompts that let officers query for vehicles by movement pattern alone, including one that flags a car's "associates" by checking which other vehicles turn up at the same cameras within a two-minute window.

Sen. Josh Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, opened a formal investigation into the company's data practices in late August and later expanded it to rival surveillance vendors Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and Axon. Sen. Bernie Sanders has pledged separate legislation to rein in the network, and Rep. Thomas Massie is pushing a bill that would cut federal funding to agencies that deploy the cameras, part of a Capitol Hill backlash that started well before Trump weighed in.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to halt funding for Flock cameras in late August, and the Los Angeles Police Department suspended its own Flock contract in July over data-sharing and security concerns.

Trump's comments put him on the opposite side of that trend, and notably at odds with some of the same Republicans leading the congressional pushback.

Same flight, different fight: Trump on AI safety

The Flock exchange came during the same in-flight conversation where reporters pressed Trump on artificial intelligence safety, a topic he was noticeably more combative about.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had published an essay a day earlier urging the industry to slow down and give safety work time to catch up, and OpenAI's Sam Altman made a similar case for pacing development, causing a crash in the stock market as soon as Monday’s trading session began.

Asked whether he'd heard those warnings directly, Trump pushed back rather than engage with the substance. "I'm not downplaying," he said, "but it's going to be more good than bad, but by a lot."

"Whoever wins AI, and we're leading by a lot. Whoever wins AI, wins," he told reporters, repeating a line he has used before to wave off regulatory pressure. He dismissed calls for tighter guardrails as coming from "negative forces" raising alarms about things that "won't happen." Asked directly if he personally uses AI, Trump confirmed that he does, without elaborating on how.

The president had previously ducked some of these uncomfortable questions. Asked about Flock in August, Trump said the administration was still studying the issue and weighing the "pros and cons" before taking a position. Sunday's exchange marks the first time he's staked out a personal view, coming just days after the September 8 deadline Hawley set for Flock to turn over its internal documents.