Trump's AI 'Czar' Plan: Regulation or Political Theater in US-China Race?

In early September, the contradiction was stark and visible. Executives from the world's largest artificial intelligence companies were publicly warning that their own creations had grown too powerful, calling for the development of the technology to slow down. The American government, meanwhile, was doing nothing about it. Then Donald Trump took to Truth Social with characteristic bluntness, dismissing the entire conversation as nonsense. "AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX," he wrote in all capitals. He followed with a rhetorical question that cut to what he saw as the real absurdity: when in business history had industry leaders ever called for regulations that would bankrupt them?

Yet within days, Trump reversed course—or appeared to. Over the weekend, sandwiched between posts about alleged Democratic corruption, he announced he would establish an "AI Force" and appoint a special envoy, whom he dubbed the "AI Czar," to oversee the sector. The position would be open only to people of exceptional intelligence, he said. He promised the government would hunt for "BAD" in the industry using existing legal tools, all while ensuring the sector's growth would not be constrained. What the role would actually entail, what authority it would wield, and what budget it would receive—Trump left all of that unspecified.

The timing suggested calculation. California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom had announced his own initiative just the day before: a commission to regulate Silicon Valley companies, including requirements that they build emergency shut-off switches into their AI systems to halt agents that had spiraled beyond control. Several states, some led by Republicans, were pushing in the same direction. Trump's announcement looked like a preemptive move to claim the regulatory space before Newsom could define it, while still keeping the actual constraints minimal.

But the real driver of Trump's thinking was not domestic politics. It was China. The competition between the United States and China for artificial intelligence dominance had become the defining technological rivalry of the era—a modern echo of the space race that had consumed American and Soviet attention in the 1960s. American companies currently held the lead, and Trump's strategy was to keep them there by letting them run. Regulation, in his view, would only handicap them in a race where the stakes were existential. If China achieved dominance in AI, the thinking went, Beijing could consolidate its position as the world's sole superpower.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, had articulated the dilemma in an essay that circulated widely among policymakers. If the United States restrained its AI capabilities in hopes that China would do the same, and China then broke that agreement, the resulting power imbalance could be militarily catastrophic. Any accord between the two nations would need either ironclad verification mechanisms or be narrow enough that cheating would not confer decisive advantage. The problem was that trust between Washington and Beijing had never been lower.

China's approach to AI regulation offered a window into why that trust was so fragile. Since 2017, when the State Council issued a national development plan for artificial intelligence, Beijing had woven the technology directly into state objectives. A strategy paper laid out milestones for achieving global AI dominance by 2030. The Chinese Cyberspace Administration issued licenses and enforced rules designed to ensure that AI systems aligned with official political doctrine. The Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, for instance, consistently returned answers loyal to the regime when asked about Taiwan, the Tiananmen Square massacre, or the treatment of Uyghurs. Chinese regulation asked: How does this system serve the state? American and European approaches asked a different question: What risks does this system pose?

Trump was scheduled to host Chinese President Xi Jinping for a state dinner at the White House on Thursday. The conversation about artificial intelligence would almost certainly dominate the agenda. The United States had already proposed a mechanism for exchanging information about serious AI risks—a transparency initiative that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had discussed with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York. "Moving from opaque to more transparency between the number one and the number two AI powers in the world is very important," Bessent said. But whether the two presidents would actually commit to such an arrangement remained uncertain. Trade restrictions on advanced chips and rare earth elements, along with the renewal of a basic trade agreement, were also on the table. Whether mutual trust would prove sufficient for reciprocal concessions on AI—that would depend on what happened in the room.