This Is Donald Trump’s AI Brain Trust
“It’s not an argument with two sides, it’s an argument with 10 sides,” one senior administration official tells WIRED about how US AI policy is being shaped.
As China’s open-weight AI models become increasingly powerful, the Trump administration is relying on a small group of officials to decide whether and what restrictions should be imposed.
The group is scattered across several departments and agencies in Washington—and they all have differing views on the best way to keep the US ahead in the race against China.
“It’s not an argument with two sides, it’s an argument with ten sides,” one senior White House official tells WIRED about the state of affairs.
With little interagency coordination in the administration, policy will almost certainly end up being set by the people with the most influence with the president. In an effort to map the forces at play, here’s a list of the current power brokers involved in the race to regulate AI.
Howard Lutnick has increasingly emerged as an influential part of the intra-administration split over AI, in part because it oversees export controls through the Bureau of Industry and Security.
Lutnick, according to people familiar , has contemplated ways to create incentives for top US labs to create their own open-weight models to counterbalance China, and he has spoken with leaders at a number of AI labs.
