Donald Trump’s sons, through a series of AI-linked defense and technology ventures, have picked up a $620m Pentagon loan, a Marine Corps robotics contract and an undisclosed air force drone deal in the past year. His longtime friend Michael Dell won a Pentagon contract worth nearly $9bn. And this week, as public support for artificial intelligence sinks to some of the lowest levels ever recorded, the president went to bat for the industry. .
Trump is resisting new restrictions on AI at a moment when his family and some of his closest allies have accumulated financial interests in the infrastructure and defense-technology ecosystem expanding alongside the AI boom, an overlap that has now drawn scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers, government ethics watchdogs and, by some accounts, his own senior aides. It’s not clear that financial interests are driving Trump’s policy, but the two have moved in close parallel. The administration frames its resistance chiefly as a matter of competitiveness.
Trump and officials including David Sacks, who co-chairs his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, have repeatedly argued that new rules could slow US AI development when the country is racing China for dominance of the technology. Sacks said at a Politico summit on Wednesday that recent warnings from Anthropic and OpenAI about the technology’s risks amounted to political theater, manufactured by advocacy groups and the press, and said existing laws were largely sufficient. But many concerns are coming from inside the industry itself.
In early September, Jacob Coxon – a researcher who spent three years working on the foundational training of AI models at both OpenAI and Anthropic – resigned and published a stark warning. Anthropic’s head of AI safety, Mrinank Sharma, separately resigned the same week, writing that “the world is in peril.” Those warnings coincided with a concrete demonstration of AI-enabled risk. A California cybersecurity firm disclosed this month that it had used artificial intelligence to build a self-spreading worm capable of hijacking WeChat accounts through a single unanswered call, and then automatically spreading through the victim’s contact list.
The firm estimated the technology could compromise more than a billion devices within hours. Tencent, the Chinese tech giant that owns WeChat, patched the vulnerability before it was deployed and said no accounts were affected, but the firm noted that building the exploit, work it said would once have taken a larger team months, took roughly 10 days with AI assistance. Around the same time, JD Vance, speaking on a Christian podcast, described certain uses of AI as carrying “really, really weird spiritual dark energy” and said there are “things about the world” that leave him “not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us”.
Polling shows how far out of step Trump’s posture is with the public, particularly once AI’s costs become tangible. A poll released on Wednesday found just 11% of Americans support an AI datacenter being built in their own community, while 65% oppose one – including 52% of Republicans – and 57% say Trump has handled the issue of AI poorly, up seven points since March. The same day, the House voted 417-3 to require datacenters to bear the costs of the electricity-grid upgrades their operations demand, underscoring how concerns about AI’s infrastructure costs have moved from polling into Congress.
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