The pacing fight just got a referee, and the referee rules for growth. On Saturday Donald Trump posted to Truth Social that AI-safety concerns are a hoax “generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats,” polled followers on renaming AI — “Superior Intelligence,” “Extreme Intelligence” or “Supreme Intelligence” — then announced an “AI Force” on the model of his Space Force and a new AI czar to oversee the industry, vowing he will “not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry.” No czar is named yet — the seat has sat empty since David Sacks left it earlier this year — and the Force carries no charter beyond protecting and advancing AI as “the next Industrial Revolution.” The Wall Street Journal frames the announcement as the answer to the industry’s own alarm: the speed-limit vote and the misalignment incidents didn’t earn a pause, they earned a no-stifle decree.
For an operator the moving part is a reprice of political risk. The safety-first posture the frontier labs have wrapped around their moats all month — Amodei’s pace-the-frontier essay, the embedded-evaluator contract, the who-pays story that priced the future at the IPO — just lost the US executive branch. When the state labels the slowdown case a hoax, the regulatory brake on the buildout lifts and the “slow down” argument migrates to the courts and the ballot box: compute-heavy expansion gets cheaper to back, and anything that needs a safety justification to ship gets harder.
Source: techcrunch.com, aljazeera.com
What I’m watching
Whether the czar gets teeth — export control, compute permitting, procurement — or stays a press-release title, and whether a growth-first decree collides with the defense-security track that produced the hallucinated manifest. One take: a no-stifle White House answers the who-pays question by subsidizing the buildout’s politics, and pushes the slowdown argument toward the dockets.