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White House shields AI gold rush, Trump family allies profit

techSep 20, 2026241,151

The Guardian reports that while it is not clear financial interests are driving White House AI policy, Donald Trump and close allies have profited as the administration resists new limits on the technology. Trump’s sons secured a $620 million Pentagon loan, a Marine Corps robotics contract and an undisclosed Air Force drone deal in the past year, and longtime friend Michael Dell won a nearly $9 billion Pentagon contract. The administration, led in part by adviser David Sacks, frames resistance to tougher rules as necessary to keep the United States competitive with China; Sacks called recent warnings from Anthropic and OpenAI “political theater” and said existing laws suffice. Independent safety alarms have grown: Jacob Coxon, who worked on foundational model training at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned saying the companies are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence,” and Anthropic’s head of AI safety, Mrinank Sharma, resigned saying “the world is in peril.” A California cybersecurity firm demonstrated an AI-built, self-spreading worm that could compromise more than a billion devices within hours, though Tencent patched the WeChat vulnerability and said no accounts were affected. Those developments have drawn scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers, government ethics watchdogs and some senior White House aides even as public support for AI falls to some of its lowest recorded levels.

Steed & Peel 23
@steedpeel23.bsky.social

News outlets are being banned from the White House, our European allies are preparing for war, AI threats accelerate, home heating oil prices will rise 60% and people are still focusing on something stupid a musician did? No wonder why we are in this mess.

1519d ago
3 sources