President Donald Trump said Sunday that he likes Flock Safety's AI-powered surveillance cameras, offering his clearest public position yet on a technology that has split lawmakers in both parties.

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

Trump acknowledged the technology has its detractors, conceding that "some people" see the cameras as "an infringement" on privacy. When a reporter noted that Flock's network "helps catch a lot of criminals," the president doubled down: "I like them."

His comments arrive at a moment of mounting scrutiny on Capitol Hill, where a Senate Judiciary probe led by Sen. Josh Hawley and a pledged bill from Sen. Bernie Sanders are taking aim at Flock's network of more than 120,000 cameras.

How the camera network works

Flock's system is built on fixed cameras mounted on poles that photograph passing vehicles and apply computer vision to record each car's make, model, color, and identifiable details such as bumper stickers and roof racks. The company has deployed more than 120,000 cameras across more than 6,000 U.S. communities, scanning roughly 20 billion vehicles a month.

Police departments say the searchable network helps them recover stolen cars and track down missing people. Critics argue it also assembles a movement log on people who have never been suspected of a crime.

That tension intensified last month, when Wired reported that Flock has been developing an AI tool able to identify and track drivers without ever capturing a name or a license plate. The software, originally known as Nightshift and since rebranded as Flock OS Investigate, was found to include 69 preset prompts that let officers search for vehicles by movement pattern alone. One prompt flags a car's "associates" by checking which other vehicles appear at the same cameras within a two-minute window. That capability broadens the search from a known vehicle or plate to patterns of movement and proximity among vehicles, which is central to the privacy concerns surrounding the system.

Bipartisan and state-level backlash

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 widened it to cover rival surveillance vendors Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and Axon. Sen. Bernie Sanders has promised standalone legislation to rein in the network, while Rep. Thomas Massie is promoting a bill that would cut off federal funding to agencies that deploy the cameras—a Capitol Hill backlash that predates Trump's remarks.

The pushback has also reached statehouses and city halls. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state agencies in late August to stop funding Flock cameras, and the Los Angeles Police Department suspended its own Flock contract in July, citing data-sharing and security concerns.

Trump's stance puts him on the opposite side of that trend—and at odds with some of the same Republicans leading the congressional charge.

Same flight, different fight: Trump on AI safety

The Flock exchange came during the same in-flight conversation in which reporters pressed Trump on artificial intelligence safety, a subject that drew a noticeably more combative response.

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—triggering a crash in the stock market as soon as Monday's trading session began.

Asked whether he had 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" sounding alarms about things that "won't happen." Asked directly whether he personally uses AI, Trump confirmed that he does, without elaborating.

The president had previously sidestepped such questions. When asked about Flock in August, he said the administration was still studying the issue and weighing the "pros and cons" before taking a position. Sunday's exchange marked the first time he staked out a personal view, and it came just days after the September 8 deadline Hawley set for Flock to turn over its internal documents.