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Trump's AI Policy, Pentagon's ChatGPT Rollout & the Antitrust Clash
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Trump family's $3B defense-tech stakes are reshaping US AI policy — and a new antitrust lawsuit just complicated every safety coordination effort. From the Pentagon's ChatGPT deployment to public safety researcher resignations, the week's biggest AI power struggles in one sharp briefing.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Trump family holds more than three billion dollars in stakes tied to defense-tech firms that are now winning major government AI contracts. That's not a side note.
The anti-regulation stance isn't accidental. Trump advisor David Sacks reportedly persuaded the president back in May to scrap a planned executive order that would have required extended review of advanced AI models.
That exemption request now has a much harder road. A federal class-action lawsuit filed this week alleges that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and SpaceX violated antitrust law by coordinating an AI slowdown.
Meanwhile the Pentagon isn't waiting. The Department of Defense has rolled out custom versions of ChatGPT and SpaceX's Grok through a platform called GenAI.mil, now accessible to one point seven million personnel.
Two researchers who worked at the frontier of this technology have now walked out and said so publicly. Jacob Coxon, who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, and Mrinank Sharma, who led safety research at Anthropic, both resigned in early September.
One concrete illustration of what accelerated AI deployment without oversight can produce: a California firm disclosed a self-spreading piece of malware this week that uses AI to hijack WeChat accounts through unanswered calls. The proof-of-concept suggests potential compromise of over one billion devices within hours.
Next week's White House summit, timed to coincide with Xi Jinping's Washington visit, is the clearest near-term test of whether any of these threads converge. Beijing has rejected the pacing argument entirely, framing it as a US attempt to lock in a permanent advantage.
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