The AI Industry starts to focus on a potential Trump presidency

Tech leaders are starting to prepare for how a second presidential term for Donald Trump might change the trajectory of artificial intelligence and its impact on the world, including gaming out scenarios based on the ways the technology advances.

The next four years will be a pivotal time for the growth of AI, potentially reshaping economic priorities, and upending global rivalries and alliances. In the aftermath of President Biden’s poor debate performance, some companies are sketching out different playbooks and preparing memos on what to expect during a Trump presidency.

Now, companies used to a White House that has worked closely with AI firms on new safety guidelines for the nascent industry and cooperated with international partners may have to adjust to a deregulatory, America-first regime.

Trump’s tendency toward unilateralism could result in consequences on an international level, said Helen Toner, former OpenAI board member and director of Strategy and Foundational Research Grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

“There have been some pretty interesting multilateral initiatives on AI over the past few years, from the G-7 Hiroshima Process to the Safety Summits to the UN,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine those continuing to have strong US participation under Trump.”

Biden led the country through the ChatGPT era, when the public woke up to the major advances in AI. The next president could lead the US through what may best be described as a transition in which the technology gains the capabilities necessary to replace humans in many roles. Depending on how fast that occurs, it could lead to economic challenges requiring fast and decisive policymaking.

One way to predict the way Trump might respond would be to look at his response during the early months of the pandemic, said one prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist. “You have a president who did very little to shore up people’s livelihoods during Covid,” he said.

On the other hand, he noted Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, the emergency effort to produce vaccines in record time, was a massive success.

Stefan Weitz, a former Microsoft executive on the founding team behind its Bing search platform and CEO and co-founder of HumanX, a company launching a new AI conference, told Semafor: “I think any company that’s not wargaming out both options are probably doing themselves a disservice.”

As AI capabilities progress, another issue the next president will have to contend with is inadequate energy production to power data centers, which are expected to grow exponentially in the coming years.

The US will soon be faced with a conundrum: whether to find a way to rapidly increase domestic power production or allow those data centers to be built in energy-rich countries that are willing to bend over backwards to bring AI development to their shores.

Meanwhile, China may be able to use its centrally controlled government to edge out the US when it comes to energy production.

In some ways, Trump would face fewer hurdles than Biden because his voter base is less concerned with the environmental impacts that come from burning more fossil fuels.

Still, Biden has shown an ability to pass comprehensive legislation like the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act that addressed the technology cold war with China.

“The electricity problem becomes a big one,” said Tim Fist, senior technology fellow at the Institution for Progress and senior Adjunct Fellow at the Center for New American Security.

Kevin Samy, a spokesman for Gladstone AI, a firm focused on AI and national security, said another route the US could take is backing a moonshot, like developing nuclear fusion by the end of the decade.

The space race-like goal would serve two purposes — putting the US on the leading edge of the next energy revolution and securing geopolitical advantage in AI capabilities. “If that fusion play works, that’s my AI play, too,” he said.

A second Trump presidency is something the AI industry has been slow to talk openly about. Behind the scenes, top executives at all the major AI companies are devoting at least some time to gaming out what might happen.

In Trump’s first term, many tech industry leaders feared what would happen and some of those concerns were realized in the form of antitrust lawsuits and lost government contracts.

It’s less evident how Trump will treat the industry in the AI era. Another new development is that a wave of tech leaders have begun to quietly support the ex-president.

How people in the AI industry view a Trump presidency also relates heavily to how they think the technology will progress over the next four years.

People who believe something like “artificial general intelligence” will be achieved in that time (there’s debate on exactly what that term means) tend to be more concerned about a Trump presidency.

But those who believe a major breakthrough in the technology is further away see some positives in how Trump’s America First philosophy could help bolster US tech companies.

There’s real fear among some in the industry that the US may blow its AI lead by giving away too much technological knowhow to other countries or by stifling innovation by overregulating the technology. In those areas, Trump may be preferable to Biden.

Another wrinkle is a landmark Supreme Court decision last week that would make it difficult to regulate the tech industry. A majority of justices ruled that courts shouldn’t defer to legal interpretations of federal watchdogs, a precedent set 40 years ago that gave agencies wide-ranging authority, often carrying out broad mandates set by the executive branch.

That opens regulations up to significant legal challenges, and it already often takes years to pass new laws, whereas the AI landscape changes by the day.

The decision all but invites Europe and states like California to take the lead on tech regulation.

But the national security implications of AI alone will nonetheless give the president a lot of power to steer the fate of the technology. Navigating the AI revolution will take deft leadership. It seems likely that some grand national project, like developing fusion power or expanding modular fission power plants to support the country’s AI ambitions will be necessary.

When it comes to technology with national security implications, maybe Congress is more effective than it seems. Exhibit 1: The TikTok ban. Here’s how the New York Times described their unusual effort to get it done:

“For nearly a year, lawmakers and some of their aides worked to write a version of the bill, concealing their efforts to avoid setting off TikTok’s lobbying might. To bulletproof the bill from expected legal challenges and persuade uncertain lawmakers, the group worked with the Justice Department and White House.

And the last stage — a race to the president’s desk that led some aides to nickname the bill the “Thunder Run” — played out in seven weeks from when it was publicly introduced, remarkably fast for Washington.”