Trump Officials Weigh AI Curbs on China as 10-Sided Fight Splits White House
Updated
Updated · WIRED · Jul 27
Trump Officials Weigh AI Curbs on China as 10-Sided Fight Splits White House
3 articles · Updated · WIRED · Jul 27
Summary
A small, fragmented group of Trump administration officials is shaping whether the US imposes new AI restrictions tied to China’s fast-improving open-weight models, with policy likely decided by those closest to President Donald Trump.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are emerging as key power centers, but they differ on how hard to hit Chinese labs and how much to regulate US developers.
Bessent has taken the toughest line, calling model distillation “IP theft” and threatening sanctions or Entity List action, while Cairncross helped craft Trump’s June 2 executive order on assessing the most powerful AI models.
David Sacks, who left the AI czar role in March, is still pushing a lighter-touch approach from outside government, arguing to his 1.6 million X followers that US frontier models remain ahead of China’s.
Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is vetting competing proposals before they reach Trump, making her a final gatekeeper as the administration tries to balance national security, trade and US AI competitiveness ahead of Xi Jinping’s September visit.