Asger Risom
While tech executives publicly beg for AI safety regulations, Donald Trump is fighting his own voters to protect the massive data centers powering the industry’s boom.
If you want to understand how weird the politics of artificial intelligence have become, just look at the current dynamics inside the White House. The billionaire tech executives actually building the technology are currently begging the government to regulate them, while Donald Trump is jumping on Truth Social to yell at his own voters for not loving massive, power-guzzling server farms enough.
According to a recent, nationally representative survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, a staggering 61 percent of Americans—including a 54 percent majority of Republicans—actively oppose the construction of new data centers in their local communities. People simply do not want their local electrical grids strained and their land devoured by massive, humming warehouses. But staring down a razor-thin midterm election map, the Trump administration has decided to double down on the very physical infrastructure its base is actively turning against.
In a recent post, Trump warned Americans not to “kill the Golden Goose,” insisting that any community that rejects an AI data center will end up “backwards and poor.” As reported by Fortune, he specifically called out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, framing the growing industry movement toward AI safety and slower deployment as a “SICK conspiracy” designed to hand global dominance over to China.
The regulatory Trojan horse
The irony here is incredibly thick. The people building the frontier models are the ones asking to hit the brakes. Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have spent the last few months loudly arguing for national safety requirements, independent evaluators, and a coordinated industry slowdown as AI models demonstrate increasingly terrifying cyber capabilities.
But the Trump administration isn’t buying the safety theater. Vice President JD Vance has explicitly called these lab pleas for regulation a “Trojan horse” for regulatory capture. And honestly, he isn’t wrong.
When you establish incredibly expensive, government-mandated safety compliance frameworks, you effectively pull up the ladder behind the companies that are already at the top. Only massive, highly funded labs can afford the armies of lawyers and compliance workers needed to navigate a strict federal regulatory regime. As Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, told Fortune, regulation written with heavy input from the leading tech monopolies simply creates an impenetrable moat around their existing empires.
The interventionist playbook
Trump’s resistance to new safety legislation does not mean his administration is taking a hands-off approach to Silicon Valley. In fact, the White House is treating the AI supply chain with an unprecedented level of aggressive, almost hostile government intervention.
Trump reminded his followers that the administration already possesses “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power” over these tech companies. He isn’t bluffing. Over the summer, the administration engaged in a massive, very public dispute with Anthropic over the military applications of its advanced Fable and Mythos 5 models. After Anthropic refused to let the Department of War use the AI for mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry without strict guardrails, the administration retaliated by issuing an export control directive that abruptly disabled global access to the models.
The administration has also completely blurred the lines between the federal government and private enterprise. When the White House permitted Nvidia to resume selling highly advanced chips to China, Trump successfully arranged for the federal government to take a direct cut of the revenue. He has even floated the idea of the government taking equity stakes directly in the frontier AI labs.
The political calculus heading into November is fascinating. Trump is currently staring at a deeply unpopular trifecta: his voters are fed up with the soaring gas prices driven by the Iran War, they actively hate the surveillance state of automated Flock license-plate cameras, and they openly despise the physical footprint of the AI boom. But when it comes to the geopolitical race for technological supremacy, the White House has made its stance incredibly clear. If it takes a massive, localized data center to beat Beijing, your town is getting a data center.
