Three tech billionaires got on the phone with Trump, and the result, according to sources cited by the Wall Street Journal, was that an AI regulatory plan pushed by DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis got stalled. Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang and Elon Musk did the talking. Whatever was in that plan, it’s on ice now.
Meanwhile the Pentagon’s own CTO, Emil Michael, is on record saying the administration shouldn’t nationalize AI companies or take stakes in them, and he’s signaling he doesn’t want regulatory oversight of them either. The position out of Washington right now, across both the industry side and the defense establishment, is roughly aligned: less oversight, not more.
Europe is singing a different tune. Ursula von der Leyen called AI “the second tipping point of our times” in her State of the Union address, putting it next to climate change, and unveiled the EU Kids Act to ban social media for under-13s across the bloc. DeepMind’s Shane Legg opened a new institute specifically to study AGI deployment risk. Yoshua Bengio’s LawZero just picked up close to 300 million dollars in grants from Canada and Germany to build safer AI systems. Groups like ControlAI have quietly become one of the most active lobbying presences on Capitol Hill over the past year.
Reporting from the Financial Times adds a detail worth sitting with: staff inside OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly felt blindsided by their own CEOs publicly calling to slow the frontier, and some worry the evaluators doing safety testing might themselves be a security risk.
None of it is landing with voters. A new NYT survey found 61 percent oppose new data center construction, but less than 1 percent name AI as their top issue heading into the midterms. The fight over how to regulate this technology is happening entirely above the electorate’s head.
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