Inside the White House Tussle to Sway Trump on AI

After White House artificial intelligence adviser David Sacks got President Trump to scrap a planned executive order in May that would subject AI models to an extended government review, senior administration officials including Scott Bessent and Susie Wiles were caught off guard and unhappy.

Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told others that Sacks had persuaded him to do so in a last-minute call, people familiar with the matter said. Treasury Secretary Bessent worried that AI-led cyberattacks could wreak havoc on the nation’s banking system, the people said. A White House team had spent months negotiating to increase oversight of AI and had consulted a range of industry executives on the order.

At the urging of Wiles and Bessent, Trump later signed a slimmed-down version of the order .

Even as Trump dismisses calls for tighter federal regulation of the industry, the quiet freakout among some of his most senior aides over what could be one of the administration’s most consequential policy decisions has begun.

In the months since the dispute, Wiles, Bessent, and other officials have gathered almost daily to discuss risks in the sector and consider potential guardrails, the people said, while trying to persuade Trump to take a more hands-on approach. White House officials have regularly held calls with executives including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and executives at Anthropic to discuss concerns.

The divide among Trump’s AI advisers—both inside and outside the government—continued in the weeks that followed, with Wiles, Bessent and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross often pushing for more government scrutiny. Sacks, a venture capitalist, Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang are among those frequently urging the president to continue taking a light touch—an approach that appears to be winning the day.

Zuckerberg, Huang and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently spoke to Trump about their concerns with one plan for an industry-funded regulator, and successfully stalled the plan, people familiar with the matter said.

Sacks has become a particular point of friction for some White House officials.

He advocated for limited government involvement in AI in his initial role as the administration’s AI and crypto czar. Some administration officials privately researched Sacks’s businesses to see if the venture investor could personally profit by blocking regulations.

Sacks held his initial role as a special government employee, which meant the Office of Government Ethics required his venture firm to divest some, but not all, of its AI holdings. His firm’s multibillion-dollar portfolio includes stakes in Elon Musk’s SpaceX and many AI startups. Sacks previously invested in Zuckerberg’s Meta, as well as Palantir and Airbnb.

He left his czar role in March to be co-chair of a White House tech advisory council.