Elon Musk’s AI nightmares could blunt Donald Trump’s tech ambitions

If Trump’s silence means he doesn’t care much about AI, that leaves the door open for policy to be steered by other key players in his administration, particularly Elon Musk.

President-elect Donald Trump didn’t talk a great deal about artificial intelligence while on the campaign trail, which is odd. Voters liked the potential improvements he could bring to the economy and inflation, yet AI could displace many jobs and a third of Americans believe it will do more harm than good, according to Gallup. If Trump’s silence means he doesn’t care much about AI, that leaves the door open for policy to be steered by other key players in his administration, particularly Elon Musk.

AI has long been a major focus for Musk. He was an early investor in Google’s DeepMind, co-founded OpenAI and now runs xAI, which has raised more than $6 billion to build powerful AI models.

But while everything seems to point toward both Trump and Musk wanting to create a light-touch regulatory environment, where AI companies accelerate their research and development, the wildcard in all this is Musk’s personal credo. He has long worried about what it can do to humanity as it becomes more capable. He co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 because he was concerned that Google’s acquisition of DeepMind would give a single corporation control over AI as it surpasses human intelligence and leave such powerful technology vulnerable to misuse.

Musk went on to found Neuralink in part to help humans stay ahead of any artificial superintelligence that might wipe us out. “We need to get there before the AI takes over,” he told his engineers in a 2022 meeting documented by Bloomberg News’ Ashlee Vance, who wrote a biography of Musk.

Years in the making, his doom-laden views on AI run so deep that they were the reason he broke up his friendship with Google’s co-founder Larry Page. “The final straw was Larry calling me a ‘species-ist’ for being pro-human consciousness instead of machine consciousness,” Musk told CNBC’s David Faber last year.

Musk might be a thin-skinned narcissist, but he’s also a purist for whom money is a means by which to achieve grander goals, and he’ll put ideology and ego before his financial interests. Musk’s purchase of Twitter, for instance, has helped him cultivate valuable influence among Republicans and with Trump himself even while its value has cratered, and it has hemorrhaged advertisers.

Among the little Trump has said on AI has been a promise to rescind President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, enacted in 2023, under which standards bodies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology check that tech firms are developing AI safely and ethically.  The president-elect has also long talked about staying ahead of China, meaning he’ll look favorably on policies that help American tech firms maintain supremacy over their Chinese counterparts.

But if Musk reaches the unique position of shaping national rules around AI, he’ll likely want to use that perch to make good on his ideology. That would do more for his ego than loosening the regulatory rules on AI, which would help his competitors just as much as it would help xAI and Tesla.​​​​

That in mind, if Trump does rescind Biden’s executive order as he has promised, expect him to replace it with something that doesn’t look too different, in that tech firms will still be required to run safety checks on their models.

Also expect a loosening of rules over what chatbots say. Trump has said he wants to see AI development “rooted in free speech” and Musk, who despises the so-called “woke mind virus,” also believes AI models are far too censored.

As it happens, most chatbots outside of xAI’s Grok are carefully designed to be cautious about what they say. A recent study by academic researchers at ETH Zurich, LatticeFlow AI and the Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology found that the biggest large language models made by companies like Google, OpenAI and Meta scored high on preventing their bots from spewing harmful or toxic content.

Musk’s worries about AI doom don’t make him a safe pair of hands for AI policy. Just look at what has happened to Twitter under his watch. Poisonous rhetoric against immigrants and people of color has proliferated on the platform, making it an unwelcome place for marginalized groups, while conspiracy theories have little trouble going viral, often thanks to posts by Musk himself.

The tech industry needs rules to keep AI from going rogue in the future, but today’s models are also riddled with gender and racial biases, according to the study by ETH and LatticeFlow. Targeting any efforts to address that as “censorship” threatens to make the problem of fairness in AI systems worse than it already is. That could lead to more insidious harm from AI in the near future.

Credit: Bloomberg