Trump left the industry-funded AI referee in limbo after three CEOs called
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk recently spoke to President Trump about concerns with an industry-funded AI regulator and successfully stalled the plan, Josh Dawsey and Amrith Ramkumar at the Wall Street Journal report via Hindustan Times. Trump ultimately did not agree to set up the group.
Demis Hassabis, Alphabet’s chief scientist and DeepMind’s leader, had been pitching White House officials on an industry-funded body that would set standards and prevent harm, similar to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. FINRA is the industry-funded overseer that sets rules for brokerage firms, a sector cop rather than a new Cabinet agency.
Many industry executives supported the concept. Zuckerberg, Huang, and Musk did not. Their concerns centered on who would be chosen and the risk of concentrating power in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
In separate conversations, they told Trump they preferred the administration’s current light-touch approach. Light touch means keep federal rules thin and let companies mostly police themselves.
Hugo Lowell at Wired reports White House aides sketched a FINRA-style framework after Hassabis’s July 14 essay and briefings. Treasury and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy drafted a body where leading labs would self-regulate frontier models.
When executives including AI adviser David Sacks and Zuckerberg learned of the effort, they called Trump in August to oppose it. The proposal was left in limbo. Wired adds that no new White House AI oversight proposals are seriously under consideration, and that Trump called AI safety concerns a “hoax” on Truth Social.
The Journal’s White House map puts Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross often pushing more scrutiny, while Sacks, Zuckerberg, and Huang urge the light touch. After Sacks helped scrap a planned May executive order for extended government review of AI models, Wiles and Bessent were unhappy. A slimmed-down order later signed.
The House Frontier Act, a bill on frontier-lab safety from Reps. Lori Trahan and Jay Obernolte, would put auditors at labs with stop-development power, Wired notes. Speaker Mike Johnson has shown no interest in bringing it to the floor before the midterms.
The private calls were about who gets to write the referee.
Pacing speeches and private calls ran on different tracks.
Sources
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