The race for artificial intelligence supremacy has pitted Silicon Valley bigwigs against Washington policymakers and Chinese competitors. President Donald Trump has taken a deregulatory approach to AI development, at times flying in the face of criticisms advocating improved safety infrastructure, an argument that the administration’s leading technology advisor has equated to a willful abandonment of the race for AI dominance.
The so-called AI doomer mindset—a viewpoint that unconstrained AI will eventually amount to a net negative for humanity, potentially even causing societal collapse—amounts to a “self-inflicted injury” on behalf of the U.S., according to David Sacks, a longtime technology investor whom Trump installed as his AI and crypto czar.
