theguardian.com
As White House shields the AI gold rush, Trump family and other allies strike it rich - with few guardrails
Donald Trump’s sons, through a series of AI-linked defense and technology ventures, have picked up a $620m Pentagon loan, a Marine Corps robotics contract and an undisclosed air force drone deal in the past year. His longtime friend Michael Dell won a Pentagon contract worth nearly $9bn. And this week, as public support for artificial intelligence sinks to some of the lowest levels ever recorded, the president went to bat for the industry. . “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades,” he posted on Truth Social Monday. “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers.” It was the first of many aggressively pro-AI posts he would make this week. Trump is resisting new restrictions on AI at a moment when his family and some of his closest allies have accumulated financial interests in the infrastructure and defense-technology ecosystem expanding alongside the AI boom, an overlap that has now drawn scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers, government ethics watchdogs and, by some accounts, his own senior aides. It’s not clear that financial interests are driving Trump’s policy, but the two have moved in...
