The heads of Silicon Valley's biggest technology companies — Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — successively lobbied U.S. President Donald Trump and blocked the creation of a regulatory body for the artificial intelligence industry.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the 17th, citing multiple sources, that the three CEOs each contacted Trump separately in recent weeks to voice opposition to the proposed body and ultimately succeeded in derailing the discussions.
What they opposed was a private-sector-led AI regulatory and standard-setting body proposed by Demis Hassabis, Google's chief scientist. According to the sources, the three CEOs argued that such a body could concentrate power in the three leading developers — OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. They also raised complaints about who would fill key posts, including executive positions at the body.
The three, who held one-on-one conversations with Trump in turn over recent weeks, are said to have expressed a preference for the "light-touch regulation" the current administration has adopted.
Views on AI regulation are also sharply divided inside the White House. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross favor stronger AI oversight frameworks and guidelines. David Sacks, who chairs the president's council of advisers on science and technology, has consistently pressed Trump to adopt a minimal-regulation approach.
Trump ultimately came down on the side of accelerating AI, writing on his social media platform Truth Social that pathological conspiracy theories were spreading around AI and data centers and that China was the only party that welcomed such a situation. Trump is scheduled to meet AI company executives next week to discuss the industry's responsibility for AI safety and, if necessary, government regulation.
The U.S. AI industry, meanwhile, has split into opposing camps since Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei raised the need to slow the pace of development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Hassabis have leaned toward Amodei's position, while Huang and Zuckerberg have taken the opposite side.
At a recent Salesforce event, Huang said safety was the top priority but also an engineering problem to be solved, arguing that speed and safety can coexist. Zuckerberg also opposed setting up an AI regulatory body, saying individual companies have the capacity to set and observe an appropriate pace of development on their own, without outside regulation.
Musk expressed sympathy with Amodei's argument, but the AI operation he leads has never actually put forward a concrete plan on development pace.
