President Donald Trump’s declaration over the weekend that he’d appoint an AI czar was an attempt to smooth over the bad PR the industry has been getting in recent weeks.
There’s little reason to believe the new adviser will change the narrative.
The Trump administration’s commonly deployed defense has been the argument that frontier labs are perfectly capable of policing themselves, while US government policy should focus on outcompeting China.
David Sacks, who formerly held that AI czar title and still chairs a White House council on science and technology, has been hammering Trump’s anti-regulation message hard despite no longer being an official government employee.
Meanwhile, the broader policy conversation is trending toward some kind of action: Chinese and US officials are discussing AI risk cooperation, OpenAI is suggesting global risk-sharing, and countries are uniting at UNGA this week to strategize how to mitigate AI’s harms.