WAPO: Trump pledged to gut Biden’s AI rules

Trump pledged to gut Biden’s AI rules, as OpenAI eyes landmark infusion

A policy proposal presented by the AI start-up warns that if the United States doesn’t invest in the technology it will lose its technological edge to China.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/11/13/openai-nuclear-subsidies-trump-ai-china/

OpenAI outlined a proposal on Wednesday calling on the United States to support the artificial intelligence industry with a landmark infusion of funding and resources, previewing a potential lobbying and policy battle emerging for the incoming Trump administration.

he proposal, presented by OpenAI’s head of global affairs, Chris Lehane, at a think tank event in Washington, calls for special economic zones with fewer regulations to incentivize new AI projects, a fleet of small nuclear reactors to power data centers aided by the U.S. Navy and a “North American Compact” allowing U.S. allies to collaborate to bolster the field, according to a document provided by OpenAI.

The proposal comes as President-elect Donald Trump has announced plans to repeal President Joe Biden’s AI executive order, arguing it “hinders” innovation. Yet Trump has emphasized some of the same issues raised in the proposal, including the increased need for power for the U.S. to lead on advanced AI technology, signaling potential common ground. Trump allies earlier this year drafted a plan to cut tech regulations and invest in military tech.

Without government investment, the United States will lose its technological edge over China and other competitors, OpenAI leaders warn in the document.

“Given the stakes, we need to think big, act big, and build big,” the OpenAI proposal reads. “These decisions determine whether a nation leads or lags in technological innovation, often with far-reaching consequences for economic competitiveness and national security.”

OpenAI spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois declined to comment beyond the proposal.

The policy recommendations signal an escalation of OpenAI’s relationship with the U.S. government, pushing the federal branch to invest in, subsidize and boost the AI industry. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has lobbied governments in the United States and the Middle East to support a plan to raise billions of dollars to build an infrastructure company that would build new chips.

“I think what you will see is … this focus on the importance of American leadership in AI innovation,” said Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow in technology policy at the Cato Institute. “That’s certainly something that we can expect to continue, and aligns with some of the rhetoric we’ve seen from the Trump White House.”

AI and Big Tech executives have said the race for better AI is essential to America’s future and have warned that if the United States does not maintain its technological edge, then China will use AI to constrain American military and commercial power. Politicians have emphasized that the push for the government to boost the AI industry has bipartisan backing.

China’s high-tech ambitions began raising alarms in Washington in 2015, when Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 plan disclosed the nation’s aim to rival the United States in key technological fields. In 2017, soon after Trump began his first presidency, Beijing policymakers added a target to become the world’s leader in AI by 2030.

While the United States is still well ahead in artificial intelligence, China has narrowed the gap and has certain advantages such as lower labor costs for time-consuming tasks such as training AI models, an asset that worries U.S. officials.

Biden tried to boost the U.S. tech industry while slowing down China’s AI progress with billions of dollars of investments in new computer chip factories and restrictions on exporting high-end AI tech to China. Trump has already signaled an aggressive military approach to China, with the appointments of fierce China hawks such as Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Florida) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) to important foreign policy positions.

Training and running AI software is extremely expensive and energy-intensive. Companies need to buy thousands of state-of-the-art computer chips and run computations through them constantly, using electricity to run them at full speed and water to keep them cool. Google, Microsoft and Facebook have spent tens of billions of dollars this year building new data centers and filling them with computer chips.

Despite Big Tech companies’ pledges to lower their carbon emissions, many have ramped up their energy use as they build data centers to train new AI models and run AI applications for their customers. The boom in new data centers for AI has, in some places, increased energy prices for everyday customers.

During the campaign, Trump met with supporters in Silicon Valley and said on the popular All-In tech podcast that he recognized how much the AI industry needed energy production.

“They need electricity at levels that nobody’s ever experienced before to be successful, to be a leader in AI,” Trump said. “The amount of electricity — that needs double what we have right now and even triple what we have right now.”

Some tech leaders have said improvements in AI software and computer chip efficiency will bring down the technology’s soaring energy costs. But Altman has argued that a massive increase in computing power is necessary even with these improvements.

“The history of the U.S. is one of iconic infrastructure projects that moved the country forward: the auto industry, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Manhattan Project, the interstate highway system,” OpenAI said in the proposal.

The document suggests a “National Transmission Highway Act” that would invest in improvements to the electrical grid, high-speed internet and new energy sources for training AI. The proposal calls for the government to “unblock the planning, permitting and payment” for new projects.

OpenAI also called on the government to commit to buying energy from new electricity-generating projects to make them less risky for private companies to build; the government should also fund new jobs programs to train workers for data centers. A “North American Compact” for AI would create an economic bloc of countries in the Western Hemisphere that could allow money, people with expertise and crucial supplies to smoothly cross borders, giving the United States even more economic heft to win the AI arms race.

AI proponents often lament the United States’ lagging approach to nuclear power generation, and some AI companies have struck deals to get shuttered nuclear plants back online or invested in start-ups trying to build cheaper, smaller reactors. The OpenAI proposal suggests tapping the U.S. Navy’s expertise in running the small nuclear reactors that power some of its submarines and surface ships. A renaissance in nuclear technology will help drive reindustrialization in the United States, OpenAI said.

Musk expands legal assault on OpenAI to also target Microsoft

Billionaire Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI but now says the ChatGPT developer has betrayed its original mission of helping humanity with artificial intelligence.





SAN FRANCISCO — Billionaire entrepreneur and Donald Trump adviser Elon Musk broadened a federal lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday, alleging the ChatGPT maker has conspired with primary backer Microsoft to break antitrust laws as the nonprofit became more focused on money-making ventures.

The amended version of a complaint Musk initially filed against OpenAI in February adds Microsoft and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman, also a former member of OpenAI’s board, as defendants. It alleges that the Windows developer worked with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to try to turn it into a for-profit company that would benefit Microsoft.

Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI is part of a Federal Trade Commission investigation into Big Tech companies and their ties to emerging AI firms. It comes as Musk has rocketed to a central position in President-elect Donald Trump’s nascent administration, potentially giving him increased influence over government policy on antitrust and AI.

“Musk is determined to remedy the abuse of the OpenAI charity he co-founded and is adamant as to the need for immediate decisive action," said Marc Toberoff, a lawyer for Musk. "AI will change the world and how it is addressed today will reverberate for decades to come.”

Musk was a founding member and major financial backer of OpenAI in 2015, but he parted with the project a few years later and last year launched a competing AI venture, xAI.

He sued OpenAI in late February, alleging that it had broken its commitment to investors to serve as a nonprofit that would aim to benefit all of humanity. Altman and Greg Brockman, another OpenAI founder and senior executive, were named as defendants.

OpenAI responded by releasing emails allegedly showing Musk tried to take control of the AI developer and merge it with his electric car company, Tesla. Musk dropped the initial lawsuit in June, then refiled it as a federal suit in the Northern District of California in August.

The updated complaint filed Thursday that names Microsoft also claims that changes to OpenAI’s board made after Altman was fired and then reinstated last year leave the company “thoroughly compromised by a fully profit-driven CEO.”

OpenAI has asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit. “Elon’s third attempt in less than a year to reframe his claims is even more baseless and overreaching than the previous ones,” said Jason Deutrom, a spokesperson for OpenAI. A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment. A spokesperson for Hoffmann did not return a request for comment.

Beyond adding the antitrust allegations, Musk’s amended complaint cites news reports about OpenAI employees quitting the company over concerns that it is not working hard enough to keep its AI from causing harm. “The resignations largely appear to be in protest of Altman and OpenAI’s increasingly unfettered and conflicted pursuit of profits at the expense of safety,” the suit said.

OpenAI is seeking to restructure from a nonprofit into a more conventional company, freeing it from the oversight of its nonprofit board. Altman and other executives have said that the company needs to be able to make money to compete with tech giants such as Google and prevent them from controlling AI technology.

Picking Sacks as ‘AI and crypto czar’ signals Trump’s pro-industry stance

David Sacks, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, has pushed President-elect Donald Trump to embrace cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.



David Sacks, a prominent Silicon Valley investor with deep ties to billionaire Elon Musk, will take the newly created role of “White House AI and crypto czar,” Trump announced Thursday night.

“David will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas,” Trump said in a post on his social network, Truth Social. “He will safeguard Free Speech online, and steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship.”

Sacks will also lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology, he said.

While Trump did not offer specifics on what the role will entail, his choice of Sacks suggests a bullish approach to AI and crypto after the Biden administration, which sought ways to rein them in. Sacks invests in both AI and crypto start-ups through his venture capital firm, Craft Ventures.

It also underscores the influence of Musk, with whom Sacks worked at PayPal in its early years and has remained close. The two corresponded privately about Musk’s plan to buy Twitter in 2022, and Musk stayed at Sacks’s home in the days after the deal closed while enlisting him to help overhaul the company, according to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of Musk.

“David Sacks is an extremely successful entrepreneur and investor who will guide policy for the second administration in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, crucial to the future of American competitiveness,” said Brian Hughes, spokesman for the Trump-Vance transition team. “President Trump and David will work together to Make America Great in crypto and AI.”

The Trump transition team declined to offer further details on the nature of Sacks’s role, which has not existed in previous administrations. Sacks did not respond to a request for comment through his venture capital firm on whether he would file the financial disclosure forms required of many presidential appointees.

Sacks is a familiar and somewhat polarizing figure in tech circles. Born in Cape Town, South Africa and raised in Tennessee, he attended Stanford University, where he and Peter Thiel bonded over their disgust with what they saw as political correctness. After graduating, Sacks and Thiel co-wrote the 1995 polemic “The Diversity Myth,” and both have continued to oppose what Sacks in 2021 called “the tyranny of woke progressivism.”

In 1999, Sacks became chief operating officer of the start-up co-founded by Thiel that would become PayPal, helping to guide it to a successful public offering in 2002 before eBay acquired it for $1.5 billion later that year. He later co-founded the messaging and collaboration app Yammer, which Microsoft bought for $1.2 billion in 2012.

In 2016, he became interim CEO of Zenefits, which provided human resources software to companies, at a time when the company was in trouble with regulators. He oversaw layoffs and regulatory settlements before being replaced in 2017.

Sacks’s public profile has grown in recent years thanks to the success of All In, the wide-ranging podcast he co-hosts with three other venture capitalists, who call themselves “the besties.” The show initially focused on the technology industry, but now often ranges into politics, helping to set the tone for the tech elite’s recent rightward turn.

In 2021, Sacks helped finance a successful campaign to recall San Francisco’s liberal district attorney, Chesa Boudin, establishing himself as a political power player. In 2023, he worked with Musk to help launch Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, serving as moderator of a live Twitter interview between Musk and DeSantis that was plagued by technical glitches.

Sacks has also been an outspoken critic of U.S. support for Ukraine, a stance with which Musk has concurred.

In June, Sacks endorsed Trump for president and hosted Trump for a fundraising dinner at his palatial home on San Francisco’s “Billionaires’ Row.” Later that month, an “All In” episode featured Trump, who said the United States must dramatically boost energy production to fuel an ongoing boom in AI, which sucks up huge amounts of electricity.

Along with Thiel and others, Sacks pushed successfully for Trump to choose JD Vance as his running mate.

Sacks also influenced Trump to reverse his stance on cryptocurrency, which Trump had called a “scam” and a “disaster waiting to happen” during his first term. After Sacks and other wealthy donors complained to Trump about the Biden administration’s strict regulations on the technology and urged him to take up a pro-crypto mantle, the Republican Party adopted a Trump-edited platform that made support for cryptocurrency its top tech policy priority.

That platform also called for the repeal of President Joe Biden’s 2023 executive order on AI, which placed new safety obligations on AI developers and called on federal agencies to mitigate its risks while encouraging its development.

Following Trump’s election, OpenAI called for massive new AI subsidies. While that would seem to align with Trump’s and Sacks’s intentions, OpenAI may also have reason to be nervous about Sacks’s appointment given his friendship with Musk, whom Trump has also tapped as a top adviser, and Sacks’s past expressions of support for “open-source” approaches to AI that make it easier for upstarts to compete with OpenAI’s products.

Musk co-founded OpenAI but later broke with the organization and is now suing it over what he calls a betrayal of its original mission and nonprofit status. OpenAI has responded with emails that it says show Musk tried to take control of the company and merge it with Tesla.

On Thursday night, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on Musk’s X, “congrats to czar @DavidSacks!” Musk replied with a laughing emoji.

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