Satire
Look, America has an AI boom. Tremendous boom. The biggest, shiniest, most electricity-hungry boom anybody’s ever seen, and frankly The Grid is sweating. Not glowing. Sweating.
The White House position is simple, maybe too simple, maybe beautifully too simple if you like your public policy served without the boring little vegetables called safeguards. Donald Trump is resisting new AI restrictions while his family and some close allies hold interests in the infrastructure and defense-technology ecosystem expanding alongside the AI boom. The Guardian reports that it is not clear those financial interests are driving policy. Important sentence. Very important. But the two are moving in close parallel.
Parallel. Very parallel. Parallel!
The guardrail that became a personality test
Trump’s public message this week was not subtle. He posted that AI needs only a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” as its control or guardrail, and described concern about AI and data centers as a “SICK conspiracy”. That is a lot of confidence to place in one executive branch, even a very executive Executive Branch, the most executive, with paperwork piled beautifully to the ceiling.
The administration’s stated argument is competitiveness. Trump and officials including David Sacks, co-chair of the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, have argued that new rules could slow US AI development while the country races China. Sacks said recent warnings from Anthropic and OpenAI amounted to political theater and that existing laws were largely sufficient.
That is The Pitch. Win the AI race. Keep the industry moving. Do not let China pass. Very muscular. Very boardroom.
But the public mood, the congressional mood, and even parts of the industry mood are not marching in the same parade.
The warnings are coming from inside the machine room
The concerns are not only from outside activists or people who fear laptops, which, let’s be honest, sometimes deserve suspicion. In early September, Jacob Coxon, who had worked on foundational AI model training at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and warned that neither company was acting responsibly. Anthropic’s head of AI safety, Mrinank Sharma, also resigned the same week and wrote that “the world is in peril”.
Around the same time, a California cybersecurity firm disclosed that it had used AI to build a self-spreading worm capable of hijacking WeChat accounts through a single unanswered call, then spreading through a victim’s contacts. Tencent patched the vulnerability before deployment and said no accounts were affected. The firm estimated the technology could have compromised more than a billion devices within hours, and said work that once might have taken a larger team months took roughly 10 days with AI assistance.
Ten days. Billion-device potential. Not a small toaster problem.
The voters are not begging for a data center next door
Polling cited in the research shows just 11% of Americans support an AI data center being built in their own community, while 65% oppose one, including 52% of Republicans. Another 57% say Trump has handled AI poorly, up seven points since March.
That is not a tiny pothole in The Road. That is The Road looking up and saying, please stop putting server farms on me.
Congress has noticed. The House voted 417-3 to require data centers to bear the costs of electricity-grid upgrades their operations demand. When the House agrees 417-3, that is not politics as usual. That is a giant neon sign reading: somebody has to pay for the power bill.
The family business problem is not theoretical
The Trump family’s AI-linked interests are concrete enough to make ethics watchdogs and Democratic lawmakers look twice, then a third time, then ask for paperwork.
Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump joined Dominari Holdings last year and helped launch American Data Centers Inc, an AI infrastructure venture in which Dominari holds a minority stake. The deal followed Trump’s announcement of an expected $20bn data center pledge from Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani and $500bn in planned private-sector AI investment, alongside an executive order unwinding Biden-era AI safeguards.
The brothers’ activity also reaches defense technology. Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth magnet startup whose products are used in AI data centers, drones and defense systems, received a $620m Pentagon loan. Three months before that loan was announced, 1789 Capital, where Trump Jr is a partner, took a stake in the company. ProPublica found that the loan request came from Peter Navarro, a senior White House adviser and close friend of Trump Jr, and that Pentagon staff were told to move at an unusually rapid pace. Trump Jr’s spokesman, the Pentagon and Vulcan have said Trump Jr played no role in the deal and that the company received no political favoritism.
Eric Trump serves as chief strategy adviser to Foundation Future Industries, the robotics startup behind a $24m Marine Corps contract. Senator Elizabeth Warren called that award “corruption in plain sight”. A third venture, Powerus, backed by both brothers, holds a $90m Air Force contract and has signed a new agreement with Pakistan’s army.
Maybe each item has an explanation. Maybe the forms are all there. But in public life, appearance matters. Tremendous appearance. The kind of appearance that walks into the room before the lawyers do.
The allies are in the same glowing ecosystem
The pattern extends beyond the family. Michael Dell, a longtime friend and donor to Trump and a member of his science and technology advisory council, saw his company win a Pentagon contract worth nearly $9bn. Ethics watchdogs questioned whether his advisory role created an unaddressed conflict.
Sacks’s own position has also drawn scrutiny. His venture firm holds stakes in SpaceX and a range of AI startups, along with earlier investments in Meta, Palantir and Airbnb. Federal ethics rules required him to divest only some holdings while he served as White House AI and crypto czar, a post he left in March. The Wall Street Journal reported that some administration officials privately looked into whether Sacks could personally benefit from blocking new AI rules.
The Journal also reported that Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang personally lobbied Trump against a proposed industry-funded AI oversight body, helping shelve the plan.
That is a very crowded room. Beautifully crowded. Too crowded for the public interest to find a chair.
The professional lesson is boring and necessary
For professionals watching AI policy, procurement, infrastructure and governance, the lesson is not that every contract is corrupt or every data center is bad. That would be too easy. Too cheap. Very discount-bin editorializing.
The lesson is that a technology this powerful needs visible rules, visible cost allocation, visible conflict management and visible accountability. If the government is going to promote an AI buildout while relatives and allies of the president hold related financial interests, then disclosure and guardrails are not anti-innovation. They are the price of public trust.
Trust is infrastructure too. Not as shiny as a data center. Doesn’t hum. Doesn’t need a cooling system. But when it fails, everything else starts to look rigged.
Next week, Trump is set to host leaders of major AI companies at the White House in a meeting arranged with House Speaker Mike Johnson, coinciding with a visit from Chinese president Xi Jinping. The administration will frame AI as competition with China. The industry will frame it as growth. Critics will frame it as risk. Communities will look at electricity bills, land use and jobs.
And the public will ask the question that no amount of tremendous branding can erase: who benefits, who pays, and who is watching The Watchers?
Very fair question. Huge question. Question!