In Silicon Valley, AI founders cheer Trump’s calls for the industry to police itself on safety
Tech Week is in full bloom in San Francisco, packing the city’s restaurants this week with venture capitalists and AI founders ebullient about the White House’s stance on regulating artificial intelligence — namely, don’t do it.
And after months of debate about leading AI companies’ unchecked AI agents meddling with everything from U.S. government websites to healthcare data, the nation now finds itself further from governing AI systems than it was a few years ago.
President Donald Trump brought tech titans to Washington late last month for a luncheon and ceremonial signing of a voluntary safety pact he described as “almost a constitution” surrounding “Super Intelligence,” the administration’s new preferred term for AI.
The 308-word agreement lays out that advanced AI labs should follow safety protocols and set up internal teams to monitor their own progress, but the administration has yet to provide details on how, in OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s words, to keep “bad things” from happening.
Safety challenges were not top of mind inside a crowded event space in San Francisco on Wednesday, where founders and funders said the government’s hands-off approach would net higher profits for companies building AI-powered defense and security systems.
Panelists praised the government’s bullish industry support at one meeting aimed at “investing in the forefront,” part of the blitz of popup events organized by Andreessen Horowitz, a venture firm whose head is a Trump science and tech adviser.
“I want to start with one figure that I think really emphasizes the investment opportunity of defense, and that’s $1 trillion. The U.S. government, for the first time, is allocating $1 trillion to its defense spending. And $13.5 billion of that will go to autonomous systems and AI,” said Kyle Stanford, a venture capital research director at PitchBook, a market intelligence platform. “That has obviously brought a lot of capital into defense tech spending, more than we’ve ever seen.”
New concerns emerge on AI safety
A day later, three researchers at OpenAI’s headquarters said the ChatGPT maker had fired them, posting that “fear and unclear rules stymie AI safety work.” Separately, David Robinson, a leader on OpenAI’s safety team until he recently resigned, said he was worried about letting the advanced labs police themselves.
“This is no substitute for hard law, and it does give a lot of freedom to the companies,” Robinson said. “The time between model generations is measured in weeks … and I think we have some very serious safety challenges in front of us in the nearer term.”
Trump has staked his political capital on the AI industry’s success, saying its unbridled development is key to winning the AI race against China. On the first day of his second term, the Republican president repealed a Biden-era executive order aimed in part at guarding against the risks that AI systems pose to consumers, workers and national security.
His administration has since reoriented federal policy away from oversight and toward rapid growth, including by canceling previous requirements for AI developers to share safety test results with the federal government. In December, Trump signed an executive order aimed at blocking AI regulations at the state level, saying a patchwork of rules could stifle the industry.
Even as Silicon Valley companies have disclosed their models’ involvement in troubling cyberattacks throughout the year, the burgeoning tech sector has continued to drive economic growth.
Concerns about AI safety centered on existential risk, rather than current real-world harms, landed at the center of debates last month, when a relatively unknown Anthropic engineer quit and called for a pause on tech development to keep “superhuman” systems from eluding controls. Then, Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs echoed the call to slow AI development. To some critics, their public manifestos appeared aimed at currying favor with investors ahead of their public listings and the midterm elections, when the political tides could turn with many voters opposed to data centers.
