This new AI energy race is inseparable from the positioning of AI as essential for national security and US competitiveness with China. OpenAI laid out its position in a blog post in October, writing, “AI is a transformational technology that can be used to strengthen democratic values or to undermine them. That’s why we believe democracies should continue to take the lead in AI development.” Then in December, the company went a step further and reversed its policy against working with the military, announcing it would develop AI models with defense-tech company Anduril to help take down drones around military bases.
That same month, Sam Altman said during an interview with The Free Press that the Biden administration was “not that effective” in shepherding AI: “The things that I think should have been the administration’s priorities, and I hope will be the next administration’s priorities, are building out massive AI infrastructure in the US, having a supply chain in the US, things like that.”
That characterization glosses over the CHIPS Act, a $52-billion stimulus to the domestic chips industry that is, at least on paper, aligned with Altman’s vision. (It also preceded an executive order Biden issued just last week, to lease federal land to host the type of gigawatt-scale data centers that Altman had been asking for.)
Intentionally or not, Altman’s posture aligned him with the growing camaraderie between President Trump and Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai all sat directly behind Trump’s family at the inauguration on Monday, and Altman also attended. Many of them had also made sizable donations to Trump’s inaugural fund, with Altman throwing in a $1 million personal donation.
It’s easy to view the inauguration as evidence that this cadre of tech leaders are aligned with each other, and with Trump’s orbit. But there are still some key dividing lines here that will be worth watching. Notably, there’s the clash over H-1B visas, which allow many non-citizen AI researchers to work in the US. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is, as of this week, no longer a part of the Department of Government Efficiency) have been pushing for those visas to be expanded. This sparked backlash from some allies of the Trump administration, perhaps most loudly Steve Bannon.
Another fault line is the battle between open- or closed-source AI. Google and OpenAI prevent anyone from knowing exactly what’s in their most powerful models, often arguing that this keeps them from being used improperly by bad actors. Musk has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over the issue, alleging that closed-source models are antithetical to OpenAI’s hybrid nonprofit structure. Meta, whose LLaMA model is open-source, recently sided with Musk in that lawsuit. Venture capitalist and Trump ally Marc Andreessen echoed these criticisms of OpenAI on X just hours after the inauguration. (Andreessen has also said that making AI models open-source “makes overbearing regulations unnecessary.”)
Finally, there are the battles of bias and free speech. As social media companies have taken vastly different approaches to moderating content—including Meta’s recent announcement to end its US fact checking program—it raises the question whether the way AI models are moderated will continue to splinter too. Musk has lamented what he calls the “wokeness” of many leading AI models, and Andreessen said on Tuesday that “Chinese LLMs are much less censored than American LLMs” (though that’s not quite true, given that many Chinese AI models have government-mandated censorship in place that forbids particular topics). Altman has been more equivocal: “No two people are ever going to agree that one system is perfectly unbiased,” he told The Free Press.
It’s only the start of a new era in Washington, but the White House has been busy. It has repealed many executive orders signed by President Biden, including the landmark order on AI that imposed rules for how the government would use the technology (while it appears to have kept Biden’s order on leasing land for more data centers). Altman is busy as well. OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank reportedly plan to spend up to $500 billion on a joint venture for new data centers; the new project was announced by President Trump, with Altman standing alongside. And, according to Axios, Altman will also be part of a closed-door briefing on January 30 with government officials, reportedly about OpenAI’s development of a powerful new AI agent.
