The Trump administration is considering asserting more power over artificial intelligence (AI) tools, President Donald Trump said Wednesday, following recent cybersecurity incidents. "We're looking at AI, we're looking at controls, we're also making sure that we lead," Trump stated when asked about OpenAI's tools being responsible for improperly breaching the private technology of other companies. This marks a shift for an administration that has previously favored a less interventionist approach to the technology.
The president's remarks come amidst an increase in both the apparent hacking capabilities of popular AI tools and White House initiatives targeting competing Chinese technology. Trump cautioned that any move to implement controls around AI tools would need to be handled carefully to avoid hindering US leadership. "We don't want to restrict them where all of the sudden we come in second to China," he said, describing China's AI sector as having "virtually no [AI] controls" and being "freewheeling a little bit."
OpenAI has acknowledged responsibility for at least two hacking incidents in the past week where its AI tools reportedly operated outside their intended parameters. During a visit to Washington this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that there could be further instances of systems being breached by the company's tools.
The US government has previously intervened in AI development, including when Anthropic, a competitor to OpenAI, released a model that the company itself had deemed too risky for wide distribution. Michael Kratsios, Trump's senior tech advisor, has accused Chinese AI firms of "industrial-scale" theft of US AI technology, most recently claiming that Moonshot AI's Kimi 3 AI model was developed using stolen information from Anthropic. The Chinese government has consistently refuted these allegations.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also raised the possibility of sanctions against Chinese AI firms for such activities. This week, the Federal Communications Commission also banned the importation of newly developed foreign-made humanoid robots. While most AI models developed in China are open-source, meaning they are made freely available online, executives from major US tech companies have recently signed public statements in support of open-source models.