3 Takes On What Trump Means for AI

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, three takes on what Trump's victory means for artificial intelligence. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes.

0:18Hello, friends. Welcome back to another Weekend Long Read episode. As you might imagine, the vast majority of commentary and opinion with regard to artificial intelligence in the last few days has been about the new context we find ourselves in of Donald Trump coming back to the White House once more. Now, we did a show earlier this week that was sort of an immediate first reaction, what it means for AI kind of episode. That was a long read in the middle of the week sort of thing. And in many ways, this is just a part two of that. People have now had a few more days to consider. So these pieces are a little bit longer and a little bit more thought through.

0:50As usual, I'm going to turn it over to AI to read these. And today I'm doing something a little bit different. I'm using voices from Eleven Labs Library. Let me know if you like this approach or if you prefer to have me do it in my own voice. But regardless, the first piece that we're reading is called What Donald Trump's Win Means for AI. It's by Harry Booth and Therin Pillai and provides a pretty good overview and starting point. When Donald Trump was last president, chat GPT had not yet been launched. Now, as he prepares to return to the White House after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, the artificial intelligence landscape looks quite different.

1:25AI systems are advancing so rapidly that some leading executives of AI companies, such as Anthropics CEO Dario Almede and Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and a prominent Trump backer, believe AI may become smarter than humans by 2026. Others offer a more general time frame. In an essay published in September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days, but also noted that it may take longer. Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees the arrival of these systems as more of a gradual process rather than a single moment. Either way, such advances could have far-reaching implications for national security, the economy, and the global balance of power.

2:09Trump's own pronouncements on AI have fluctuated between awe and apprehension. In a June interview on Logan Paul's Impulsive podcast, he described AI as a superpower and called its capabilities alarming. And like many in Washington, he views the technology through the lens of competition with China, which he sees as the primary threat in the race to build advanced AI. Yet even his closest allies are divided on how to govern the technology. Musk has long voiced concerns about AI's existential risks, while J.D. Vance, Trump's vice president, sees such warnings from industry as a ploy to usher regulations that would entrench the tech incumbents.

2:49These divisions among Trump's confidants hint at the competing pressures that will shape AI policy during Trump's second term. Section. Undoing Biden's AI legacy. Trump's first major AI policy move will likely be to repeal President Joe Biden's executive order on AI. The sweeping order, signed in October 2023, sought to address threats the technology could pose to civil rights, privacy, and national security, while promoting innovation, competition, and the use of AI for public services. Trump promised to repeal the executive order on the campaign trail in December 2023, and this position was reaffirmed in the Republican Party platform in July, which criticized the executive order for hindering innovation and imposing radical left-wing ideas on the technology's development.

3:35Sections of the executive order, which focus on racial discrimination or inequality, are not as much Trump's style, says Dan Hendricks, executive and research director of the Center for AI Safety. While experts have criticized any rollback of bias protections, Hendricks says the Trump administration may preserve other aspects of Biden's approach. I think there's stuff in the executive order that's very bipartisan, and then there's some other stuff that's more specifically Democrat-flavored, Hendricks says. It would not surprise me if a Trump executive order on AI maintained or even expanded on some of the core national security provisions within the Biden executive order, building on what the Department of Homeland Security has done for evaluating cybersecurity.

4:15biological and radiological risks associated with AI, says Samuel Hammond, a senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, a technology-focused think tank. The fate of the USAI Safety Institute, an institution created last November by the Biden administration to lead the government's efforts on AI safety, also remains uncertain. In August, the AISE signed agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic to formally collaborate on AI safety research and on the testing and evaluation of new models. Almost certainly, the AI Safety Institute is viewed as an inhibitor to innovation, which doesn't necessarily align with the rest of what appears to be Trump's tech and AI agenda, says Keegan McBride, a lecturer in AI government and policy at the Oxford Internet Institute.

5:01But Hammond says that while some fringe voices would move to shutter the Institute, most Republicans are supportive of the IC. They see it as an extension of our leadership in AI. Congress is already working on protecting the IC. In October, a broad coalition of companies, universities, and civil society groups, including OpenAI, Lockheed Martin, Carnegie Mellon University, and the non-profit ENCODE Justice, signed a letter calling on key figures in Congress to urgently establish a legislative basis for the AC. Efforts are underway in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and both reportedly have pretty wide bipartisan support, says Hamza Chaudhry, U.S.

5:38policy specialist at the non-profit Future of Life Institute. Section. America First AI and the Race Against China. Trump's previous comments suggest that maintaining the U.S.'s lead in AI development will be a key focus for his administration. We have to be at the forefront, he said on the Impulsive podcast in June. We have to take the lead over China. Trump also framed environmental concerns as potential obstacles, arguing they could hold us back in what he views as the race against China. Trump's AI policy could include rolling back regulations to accelerate infrastructure development, says Dean Ball, a research fellow at George Mason University.

6:15There's the data centers that are going to have to be built. The energy to power those data centers is going to be immense. I think even bigger than that. Chip production, he says. We're going to need a lot more chips. While Trump's campaign has at times attacked the CHIPS Act, which provides incentives for chipmakers, leading some analysts to believe that he is unlikely to repeal the act. Chip export restrictions are likely to remain a key lever in USAI policy. Building on measures he initiated during his first term, which were later expanded by Biden, Trump may well strengthen controls that curb China's access to advanced semiconductors.

6:49It's fair to say that the Biden administration has been pretty tough on China, but I'm sure Trump wants to be seen as tougher, McBride says. It is quite likely that Trump's White House will double down on export controls in an effort to close gaps that have allowed China to access chips, says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The overwhelming majority of people on both sides think that the export controls are important, he says. The rise of open-source AI presents new challenges. China has shown it can leverage U.S.

7:22systems, as demonstrated when Chinese researchers reportedly adapted an earlier version of Meta's Lama model for military applications. That's created a policy divide. You've got people in the GOP that are really in favor of open source, Ball says, and then you have people who are China hawks and really want to forbid open source at the frontier of AI. My sense is that because a Trump platform has so much conviction in the importance and value of open source, I'd be surprised to see a movement towards restriction, Singer says. Despite his tough talk, Trump's deal-making impulses could shape his policy towards China.

7:56I think people misunderstand Trump as a China hawk. He doesn't hate China, Hammond says, describing Trump's transactional view of international relations. In 2018, Trump lifted restrictions on Chinese technology company ZTE in exchange for a$1.3 billion fine and increased oversight. Singer sees similar possibilities for AI negotiations, particularly if Trump accepts concerns held by many experts about AI's more extreme risks, such as the chance that humanity may lose control over future systems. Section. Trump's coalition is divided over AI. Debates over how to govern AI reveal deep divisions within Trump's coalition of supporters.

8:35Leading figures, including Vance, favor looser regulations of the technology. Vance has dismissed AI risk as an industry ploy to usher in new regulations that would make it actually harder for new entrants to create the innovation that's going to power the next generation of American growth. Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who served on Trump's 2016 transition team, recently cautioned against movements to regulate AI. Speaking at the Cambridge Union in May, he said any government with the authority to govern the technology would have a global totalitarian character. Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, gave$2.5 million to a pro-Trump superpolitical action committee and an additional$844 ,600 to Trump's campaign and the Republican Party.

9:22Yet, a more safety-focused perspective has found other supporters in Trump's orbit. Hammond, who advised on the AI Policy Committee for Project 2025, a proposed policy agenda led by right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation and not officially endorsed by the Trump campaign, says that, within the people advising that project, there was a very clear focus on artificial general intelligence and catastrophic risks from AI. Musk, who has emerged as a prominent Trump campaign ally through both his donations and his promotion of Trump on his platform X, formerly Twitter, has long been concerned that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity.

10:00Recently, Musk said he believes there's a 10 % to 20 % chance that AI goes bad. In August, Musk posted on X, supporting the now-vetoed California AI safety bill that would have put guardrails on AI developers. Hendricks, whose organization co-sponsored the California bill and who serves as safety advisor at XAI Musk's AI company, says, if Elon is making suggestions on AI stuff, then I expect it to go well. However, there's a lot of basic appointments and groundwork to do, which makes it a little harder to predict, he says. Trump has acknowledged some of the national security risks of AI. In June, he said he feared deepfakes of a U.S.

10:40president threatening a nuclear strike could prompt another state to respond, sparking a nuclear war. He also gestured to the idea that an AI system could go rogue and overpower humanity, but took care to distinguish this position from his personal view. However, for Trump, competition with China appears to remain the primary concern. But these priorities aren't necessarily at odds, in AI safety regulation does not inherently entail ceding ground to China, Hendricks says. He notes that safeguards against malicious use require minimal investment from developers. You have to hire one person to spend, like, a month or two on engineering, and then you get your jailbreaking safeguards, he says.

11:19But with these competing voices shaping Trump's AI agenda, the direction of Trump's AI policy agenda remains uncertain. In terms of which viewpoint President Trump and his team side towards, I think that is an open question, and that's just something we'll have to see, says Chaudhry. Now is a pivotal moment.

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13:48So once again, let's turn it over to Eleven Labs and see if you find yourself agreeing. AI is powerful, dangerous, and controversial. What will Donald Trump do with it? In 2020, when Joe Biden won the White House, generative AI still looked like a pointless toy, not a world-changing new technology. The first major AI image generator, Dal-E, wouldn't be released until January 2021, and it certainly wouldn't be putting any artists out of business, as it still had trouble generating basic images. The release of ChatGPT, which took AI mainstream overnight, was still more than two years away. The AI-based Google search results that are, like it or not, now unavoidable, would have seemed unimaginable.

14:35In the world of AI, four years is a lifetime. That's one of the things that makes AI policy and regulation so difficult. The gears of policy tend to grind slowly, and every four to eight years they grind in reverse when a new administration comes to power with different priorities. That works tolerably for, say, our food and drug regulation or other areas where change is slow and bipartisan consensus on policy more or less exists. But when regulating a technology that is basically too young to go to kindergarten, policymakers face a tough challenge. And that's all the more case when we experience a sharp change in who those policymakers are, as the U.S.

15:19will after Donald Trump's victory in Tuesday's presidential election. This week, I reached out to people to ask, what will AI policy look like under a Trump administration? Their guesses were all over the place, but the overall picture is this. Unlike on so many other issues, Washington has not yet fully polarized on the question of AI. Trump's supporters include members of the accelerationist tech right, led by the venture capitalist Mark Andressen, who are fiercely opposed to regulation of an exciting new industry. But right by Trump's side is Elon Musk, who supported California's SB 1047 to regulate AI and has been worried for a long time that AI will bring about the end of the human race, a position that is easy to dismiss as classic Musk's zanniness, but is actually quite mainstream.

16:11Trump's first administration was chaotic and featured the rise and fall of various chiefs of staff and top advisors. Very few of the people who were close to him at the start of his time in office were still there at the bitter end. Where AI policy goes in his second term may depend on who has his ear at crucial moments. Section, where the new administration stands on AI. In 2023, the Biden administration issued an executive order on AI, which, while generally modest, did mark an early government effort to take AI risk seriously. The Trump campaign platform says the executive order hinders AI innovation and imposes radical left-wing ideas on the development of this technology and has promised to repeal it.

16:59There will likely be a day one repeal of the Biden executive order on AI. Samuel Hammond, a senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, told me, though he added, what replaces it is uncertain. The AI Safety Institute created under Biden, Hammond pointed out, has broad bipartisan support, though it will be Congress's responsibility to properly authorize and fund it, something they can and should do this winter. There are reportedly drafts in Trump's orbit of a proposed replacement executive order that will create a Manhattan Project for military AI and build industry-led agencies for model evaluation and security.

17:44Past that, though, it's challenging to guess what will happen because the coalition that swept Trump into office is, in fact, sharply divided on AI. How Trump approaches AI policy will offer a window into the tensions on the right, Hammond said. You have folks like Mark Andresen who want to slam down the gas pedal, and folks like Tucker Carlson who worry technology is already moving too fast. J.D. Vance is a pragmatist on these issues, seeing AI and crypto as an opportunity to break big tech's monopoly. Elon Musk wants to accelerate technology in general while taking the existential risks from AI seriously.

18:22They are all united against woke AI, but their positive agenda on how to handle AI's real-world risks is less clear. Trump himself hasn't commented much on AI, but when he has, as he did in a Logan Paul interview earlier this year, he seemed familiar with both the accelerate for defense against China perspective and with expert fears of doom. We have to be at the forefront, he said. It's going to happen. And if it's going to happen, we have to take the lead over China. As for whether AI will be developed that acts independently and seizes control, he said, you know, there are those people that say it takes over the human race.

19:04It's really powerful stuff, AI. So let's see how it all works out. In a sense, that is an incredibly absurd attitude to have about the literal possibility of the end of the human race. You don't get to see how an existential threat works out. But in another sense, Trump is actually taking a fairly mainstream view here. Many AI experts think that the possibility of AI taking over the human race is a realistic one, and that it could happen in the next few decades, and also think that we don't know enough yet about the nature of that risk to make effective policy around it. So, implicitly, a lot of people do have the policy, it might kill us all, who knows.

19:47I guess we'll see what happens. And Trump, as he so often proves to be, is unusual mostly for just coming out and saying it. Section. We can't afford polarization. Can we avoid it? There's been a lot of back and forth over AI, with Republicans calling equity and bias concerns woke nonsense. But, as Hammond observed, there is also a fair bit of bipartisan consensus. No one in Congress wants to see the U.S. fall behind militarily or to strangle a promising new technology in its cradle, and no one wants extremely dangerous weapons developed with no oversight by random tech companies. Meta's chief AI scientist Yan Li-Khun, who is an outspoken Trump critic, is also an outspoken critic of AI safety worries.

20:37Musk supported California's AI regulation bill, which was bipartisan and vetoed by a Democratic governor. And of course, Musk also enthusiastically backed Trump for the presidency. Right now, it's hard to put concerns about extremely powerful AI on the political spectrum. But that is actually a good thing, and it would be catastrophic if that changes. With a fast-developing technology, Congress needs to be able to make policy flexibly and empower an agency to carry it out. Partisanship makes that next to impossible. More than any specific item on the agenda, the best sign about a Trump administration's AI policy will be if it continues to be bipartisan and focused on the things that all Americans, Democratic or Republican, agree on.

21:29like that we don't want to all die at the hands of superintelligent AI. And the worst sign would be if the complex policy questions that AI poses got rounded off to a general regulation is bad or the military is good view, which misses the specifics. Hammond, for his part, was optimistic that the administration is taking AI appropriately seriously. They're thinking about the right object level issues, such as the national security implications of AGI being a few years away, he said. Whether that will get them to the right policies remains to be seen, but it would have been highly uncertain in a Harris administration too.

22:11Last piece today is by Sharon Goldman and is called Think Donald Trump's AI Policy Plans Are Predictable? Prepare to be surprised. Think you know Trump's AI agenda? Get ready for a surprise. President-elect Donald Trump has telegraphed big changes to the nation's all-important AI strategy, many of which are expected to be implemented immediately after his inauguration in January. But while some of Trump's plans are predictable, as part of an effort to make the U.S. the world's leader in the fast-emerging technology, others are still a mystery, experts told Fortune. Part of the reason is that AI policy is complex, and because AI is such a new technology, officials are still trying to figure it out.

22:53Nobody has clearly laid out a perfect AI regulation strategy, because, frankly, there probably isn't one. We're still so early in this innovation cycle, said Aaron Levy, CEO of Cloud Storage Company Box. Another wildcard is the chorus of voices advising Trump on technology and AI policy, including billionaire Elon Musk, who campaigned for Trump and contributed over$100 million to a pro-Trump political action committee. Who Trump will ultimately choose to listen to, among the conflicting agendas, is unknown. Given that there are so many voices in that room and so many powerful men with egos, how is that going to work out, said Chloe Audio, an AI policy consultant who works with AI companies and government.

23:37Still, Trump has sent some very clear signals about what he'll do about AI. The most obvious experts agree is that he'll make good on his promise to repeal President Joe Biden's year-old executive order aimed at making AI safe and secure. The order sets safety and privacy standards for AI and promotes its ethical use. But the 2024 Republican platform called the order dangerous, saying that it hinders AI innovation and imposes radical left-wing ideas on the development of this technology. In general, Trump will likely pick up where his first administration left off in January 2020, when it issued guidance to federal agencies about AI.

24:18The memo called on the government to reduce barriers to AI development and adoption and avoid regulations that hamper innovation and growth, said Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank in Washington, D.C. Section AI Safety on the Chopping Block? One thing that may be on the chopping block is the AI Safety Institute. The executive order directed the Department of Commerce to create the institute, housed within the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and is intended to evaluate the safety of the most advanced artificial intelligence to national security, public safety, and individual rights.

24:57Adam Aft, the lead attorney in Baker McKenzie's North America Technology Transactions Group, with a focus on AI, said the Safety Institute is among the elements of Biden's executive order that is most likely to be killed, and since Trump has said he would repeal the order, it would likely be one of the first and easiest changes. However, there are many supporters inside and outside government who don't want the IC to vanish, said Tierar. A group of tech industry players and think tanks have been pushing Congress to make the AC permanent before the end of the year and before Trump takes office.

25:30If IC survives, Trump could appoint new leaders to it that, in a twist, could be among those who fear AI is long-term risk to humanity. Among those who have talked about the dangers is Musk, who is now in a position to influence Trump's AI policies and his picks for the ASE's leadership. Trump could turn to Musk and say, who do you want to bring in, said Therer, and that's going to be a really interesting moment. Section, Open Source AI, Friend or Foe. Another big question is Trump's position on open source AI, or AI tools and models available for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. Supporters of open source AI, which includes models from Meta, Mistral, and Musk's XAI, describe it as a counterbalance to AI from big tech companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, which typically keep their AI models closed and proprietary.

26:24But there is also a strong push to block unfriendly nations from getting access to advanced AI due to national security concerns, by regulating AI exports, and limiting cybersecurity improvements. For example, Chinese researchers reportedly developed an AI model for military use by building on Meta's open-source model, LAMA. That is going to be a high-level catfight all the way up, Thierer said about the coming debate within the Trump administration about how to regulate open-source AI. Audio pointed out that J.D. Vance, Trump's vice president-elect, has previously supported open-source AI development.