White House paused work on an AI regulatory agency following opposition from Trump and technology companies

According to Wired, Treasury Department and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy prepared a preliminary proposal to establish a regulatory body similar to FINRA, under which leading AI labs would self-regulate the development of frontier models. In August, however, technology leaders, including former Trump AI adviser David Sacks and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, learned about the initiative and, through a series of phone calls, persuaded President Trump to oppose the proposal. According to sources, work on the proposal was thus left in limbo, and the White House has not seriously considered any new regulatory initiative since then. According to sources cited by Wired, a text of nearly four thousand words by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on the risks of frontier AI also contributed to the president's opposition. Trump advisers viewed it as unnecessarily stoking fears, even though it represents a relatively moderate position within the debate on AI. Trump subsequently called AI safety concerns a hoax on Truth Social. Without leadership from the White House, regulation is left to Congress, which lacks unity. Although the bipartisan Frontier Act has the strongest support among lawmakers and some AI companies and would allow Commerce Department to place its own auditors at AI labs, with the ability to halt the development of a model posing a catastrophic risk, it has little chance of passing because of the lack of voting days in the House of Representatives before the midterm elections and divisions among lawmakers. There are also two competing proposals for a so-called kill switch, but technology companies have shown only limited interest in them.