The Trump administration's AI doomer moment

Casey Newton· Host0:00

[ on-hold music] This is Platformer Plus. I'm Casey Newton. The following column was created using a synthetic voice clone made by ElevenLabs. [ on-hold music] In today's episode, the Trump administration's AI doomer moment. A year ago, officials all but sneered at the idea of AI safety. A new frontier model has them reconsidering. This is a column about AI. My fiancée works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure at platformer.news/ethics. In February twenty twenty-five, Vice President JD Vance took the stage at the Paris AI Action Summit to share the administration's views on AI regulation. Quote, "The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety," he warned. Excessive regulations might kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off, Vance said, and suggested that AI companies asking to be regulated might simply be trying to crush their future competitors. Vance's remarks reflected the idea then common among Trump officials that fears about AI capabilities are dramatically overstated. David Sacks, the White House's AI and crypto czar, has referred to a doomer industrial complex enacting a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering. Michael Kratsios, who leads the Office of Science and Technology Policy, has complained that international efforts to govern AI