The Complicated Relationship Between Sam Altman and Donald Trump
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President Donald Trump has been clear about his vision for America as an AI superpower, signing in his first week an executive order geared toward helping AI “promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” In order to achieve this goal, the Trump administration has forged a relationship with OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman—but that could complicate things for Elon Musk.
As my colleague Matteo Wong wrote for The Atlantic on Wednesday, the two technologists are bitter rivals. Musk was one of OpenAI’s initial investors and served on the company’s board, but he left in 2018. Ever since ChatGPT made OpenAI a household name, Musk has routinely taken potshots at the company, calling its chatbot too “woke” and using the nickname “Scam Altman” to refer to its CEO. Meanwhile, he’s launched his own AI firm, xAI, whose products have lagged behind OpenAI’s.
Musk and Altman may both need Trump’s blessing to unlock considerable resources for their projects and to stave off inconvenient regulations. “Anything that OpenAI might gain from Trump, xAI could reap as well,” Matteo writes. The companies are in competition with each other, so any advantage that one gets may be to the detriment of the other, building up a tension between Musk and Altman that could eventually snap.
How Sam Altman Could Break Up Elon Musk and Donald Trump
By Matteo Wong
The rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk is entering its Apprentice era. Both men have the ambition to redefine how the modern world works—and both are jockeying for President Donald Trump’s blessing to accelerate their plans.
Altman’s company, OpenAI, as well as Musk’s ventures—which include SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI—all depend to some degree on federal dollars, permits, and regulatory support. The president could influence whether OpenAI or xAI produces the next major AI breakthrough, whether Musk can succeed in sending a human to Mars, and whether Altman’s big bet on nuclear energy, and fusion reactors in particular, pans out.
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- “Terrified” federal workers are clamming up: Karen Hao recently spoke with more than a dozen federal workers about the culture of fear and paranoia that they say is spreading through their agencies under the Trump administration. They allege that they are being hindered from doing their work—some of which touches on risks emerging from AI. “Federal workers I spoke with now say that neither they nor their colleagues want to be associated in any way with working on or promoting disinformation research,” Hao writes, “even as they are aware that the U.S. government’s lack of visibility into such networks could create a serious national vulnerability, especially as AI gives state-backed operations powerful upgrades.”