Attorney General Todd Blanche sought to clarify President Donald Trump’s criticism of the calls for an artificial intelligence development slowdown as a “hoax,” contending the issue is only being discussed now because November’s midterm elections are 50 days away.

Blanche told reporters that what Trump described as a “hoax” was the way the debate exploded onto the national scene after former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned last week, predicting that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”