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 close parallel.

The administration frames its resistance chiefly as a matter of competitiveness. Trump and officials including David Sacks, who co-chairs his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, have repeatedly argued that new rules could slow US AI development when the country is racing China for dominance of the technology. Sacks said at a Politico summit on Wednesday that recent warnings from Anthropic and OpenAI about the technology’s risks amounted to political theater, manufactured by advocacy groups and the press, and said existing laws were largely sufficient.

But many concerns are coming from inside the industry itself. In early September, Jacob Coxon – a researcher who spent three years working on the foundational training of AI models at both OpenAI and Anthropic – resigned and published a stark warning.

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” He said colleagues privately believe the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. Anthropic’s head of AI safety, Mrinank Sharma, separately resigned the same week, writing that “the world is in peril.”

Those warnings coincided with a concrete demonstration of AI-enabled risk. A California cybersecurity firm disclosed this month that it had used artificial intelligence to build a self-spreading worm capable of hijacking WeChat accounts through a single unanswered call, and then automatically spreading through the victim’s contact list. The firm estimated the technology could compromise more than a billion devices within hours.

Tencent, the Chinese tech giant that owns WeChat, patched the vulnerability before it was deployed and said no accounts were affected, but the firm noted that building the exploit, work it said would once have taken a larger team months, took roughly 10 days with AI assistance. Around the same time, JD Vance, speaking on a Christian podcast, described certain uses of AI as carrying “really, really weird spiritual dark energy” and said there are “things about the world” that leave him “not shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us”.

Polling shows how far out of step Trump’s posture is with the public, particularly once AI’s costs become tangible. A poll released on Wednesday found just 11% of Americans support an AI datacenter being built in their own community, while 65% oppose one – including 52% of Republicans – and 57% say Trump has handled the issue of AI poorly, up seven points since March. The same day, the House voted 417-3 to require datacenters to bear the costs of the electricity-grid upgrades their operations demand, underscoring how concerns about AI’s infrastructure costs have moved from polling into Congress.

If the federal government did enact regulations that ultimately damaged AI profits, it’s possible some members of the Trump family would feel the pain. Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump joined the investment firm Dominari Holdings last year and helped launch American Data Centers Inc, an AI infrastructure venture in which Dominari holds a minority stake. The deal came weeks after their father unveiled an expected $20bn datacenter pledge from Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani, and $500 bn in planned private sector AI investment, alongside an executive order unwinding Biden-era AI safeguards.

Since then, the brothers have moved from infrastructure into defense contracting, most notably through Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth magnet startup whose products are used in AI datacenters, drones and defense systems. Three months before the Pentagon announced its $620m loan to Vulcan in December – the largest the defense department’s office of strategic capital has ever issued – 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Trump Jr is a partner, quietly took a stake in the company. A ProPublica investigation found the loan request came not from Vulcan or the Pentagon but from Peter Navarro, a senior White House adviser and close friend of Trump Jr’s, and that Pentagon staff were told to move at an “unusually rapid pace”.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” one person involved in the deal told the outlet.

Trump Jr’s spokesman, the Pentagon and Vulcan have all said he played no role in the deal and that the company received no political favoritism. Eric Trump, separately, serves as chief strategy adviser to Foundation Future Industries, the robotics startup behind the $24m Marine Corps contract; senator Elizabeth Warren called that award “corruption in plain sight”. A third venture, the drone maker Powerus backed by both brothers and having signed a new agreement with Pakistan’s army, also holds a $90m air force contract, and has separately pitched its technology to Gulf states amid Iran’s striking of US bases across the region. Drones are widely expected to increasingly utilize AI technology in the coming years.

A Washington Post analysis in July found 15 companies tied to the brothers’ investment funds have generated at least $3.2bn in direct federal business since they got involved, but SpaceX and Anduril, the latter an AI-powered defense technology firm behind Lattice account for 97% of that figure, and 10 of the 15 companies already had government business before the Trump sons invested.

Excluding SpaceX and Anduril, the remaining 13 companies had received $103m in direct federal funding and nearly $1.8bn in long-term commitments after the brothers’ investments.

The pattern extends beyond Trump’s family to some of his closest technology allies. Sacks’s influence over Trump’s regulatory decisions has been substantial: in May, he reportedly persuaded the president in a last-minute call to scrap a planned executive order that would have subjected AI models to extended government review, overriding the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, who had spent months negotiating the stronger version.

His own financial position has drawn scrutiny inside the administration as a result. Sacks’s venture firm holds stakes in SpaceX and a range of AI startups, along with earlier investments in Meta, Palantir and Airbnb; federal ethics rules required him to divest only some of those holdings while he served as the White House’s AI and crypto czar, a post he left in March. Some administration officials have privately looked into whether Sacks could personally benefit from blocking new AI rules, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The outlet reported that Musk pushed in the same direction, joining Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang last month in personally lobbying Trump against a proposed industry-funded AI oversight body, helping shelve the plan. Dell, a member of Trump’s science and technology advisory council and a longtime friend and donor to the president, saw his company win the nearly $9bn Pentagon contract in May, prompting ethics watchdogs to question whether his advisory role created an unaddressed conflict.

The technology industry is not uniformly aligned behind Trump. Federal filings on OpenSecrets show the broader communications and electronics sector still sends roughly two-thirds of its political money to Democratic candidates and committees this cycle. Trump’s support among industry figures has come instead from a narrower group: OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have given tens of millions of dollars to a pro-Trump super Pac and Trump’s inaugural committee, though have also donated to Democrats in the past.

The Pentagon’s own account of its safeguards makes no distinction between a routine contractor and a company whose investors include the president’s son, which is a gap Democratic lawmakers asked the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate last month.

Next week, Trump is set to host the leaders of the country’s leading AI companies at the White House, a meeting arranged with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, that will coincide with a visit from the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.