Mounting fears over what unregulated artificial intelligence could mean for humanity’s future have sparked a bitter civil war at the White House.
Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have met almost daily over the past several months with other officials and aides worried about a lack of safeguards on AI development. A growing number of high-profile figures in the AI industry warn that out-of-control bots pose an existential threat to mankind.
Wiles and Bessent kicked off those meetings after White House adviser David Sacks broadsided them in May by getting President Donald Trump to scrap an executive order that would have tightened government oversight of new models by developers like Anthropic and OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Sacks, who initially worked as Trump’s AI and crypto czar before moving to co-chair the president’s tech advisory council in March, has helped write the rules for AI and crypto while remaining financially tied to a venture capital firm with extensive stakes in both sectors. He got Trump to drop the May executive order in a last-minute phone call, according to the Journal.
Trump’s chief of staff and treasury secretary eventually persuaded him to sign a more limited version of the measures than the one officials had otherwise spent months putting together. Sean Cairncross, national cyber director, has since joined them in pushing the president to take a stronger stance on oversight and regulation.
Big Tech bosses like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang have backed Sacks in advocating for less government scrutiny. SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who poured at least $250 million into the president’s 2024 campaign and briefly served as his hatchet man at the “Department of Government Efficiency,” has also lobbied against plans for a regulator funded by the industry.
Sacks’ camp would appear, for now, to be winning out. Trump decided against setting up the industry-funded regulator on the advice of Musk, Zuckerberg, and Huang. The president wrote on Truth Social on Monday that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” having called warnings about unregulated development a “HOAX” in an earlier post.
Despite the president’s confidence in his own abilities, a “quiet freakout” among his senior aides has begun, the Journal reported.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Treasury Department for comment on this story.
