Democrats are putting Trump’s tech bro donors on notice

This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 29 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”

Two years ago, President Donald Trump issued a striking warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence during an interview with Fox Business.

“AI is very complex,” he said at the time. “It’s got tremendous potential, but it also has potential to destroy.”

That’s quite a sober — and dare I say prescient — assessment from the guy who now spends a lot of his time trying to convince the country and the world that AI safety fears are just a “hoax.”

On Tuesday, the president hosted dozens of Silicon Valley executives at the White House, including many who have shelled out some serious cash for his favorite causes and projects. The summit’s guests included people like Elon Musk, who, of course, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars propping up Trump and Republicans.

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, made the guest list. Karp donated $1 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC supporting Trump, after the 2024 election. While Huang did not donate to the 2024 Trump campaign, he did help fund the president’s tacky gilded ballroom. As did Jeff Bezos, executive chair of Amazon, which was another top donor for Trump’s ballroom. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were also at Tuesday’s summit, and their companies also forked over big money for the president’s ballroom.

And Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, was in attendance. The New York Times reported last year that Brockman attended an exclusive White House dinner honoring major donors who contributed $2.5 million or more to Trump’s ballroom project.

So, what did this tech bro cohort accomplish at that summit? They signed a commitment to “self-police” themselves. Yes, some of the same people who have been warning us about the dangers of AI are now saying, “You know what? Just trust us, everyone. We got this.”

Meanwhile, on the very same day those tech CEOs assembled at the White House, the Times put out a story with this headline: “OpenAI Ignored Employees Who Warned It Wasn’t Doing Enough About Security.” The Times reported, “Months before OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue, two employees raised an alarm with top executives. They were ignored.” Executives at OpenAI reportedly told employees to move forward because the company wanted to meet a crucial business deadline.

A spokesman for OpenAI told the Times that the tech giant “was committed to safety and took security concerns seriously.” But the report noted that employees and independent security researchers said incidents like this one were “part of a pattern where the San Francisco company did not prioritize security.”

So tell me again why self-regulation is the answer? And why did Trump change his tune on AI? Does it have anything to do with the fact that top AI firms and companies all gave money to Trump’s pet projects? Or maybe that he and his family are up to their eyeballs in investments in AI companies?

Those are questions Democrats will likely want to get to the bottom of if they retake Congress in November. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., who could be the possible new chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said that if Democrats take back the chamber, they would investigate what he called the Trump administration’s “nakedly corrupt dealings with the private sector.”

In a letter to the National Defense Industrial Association, which represents hundreds of companies with contracts with the government, Himes wrote: “At times, the Administration has appeared to inappropriately fuse the government contracting process with the attempted extraction of political or private favors.”

Himes said that, under his control, the committee may seek out information, documents, communications and transcribed testimony to “understand how corporate contributions to this project were solicited and made, who was involved in those discussions, and whether contributions were related in any way to the goal of obtaining or maintaining government contracts, access to the President or Administration officials, or other benefits.”

In other words: The Trump administration should get ready — because if Democrats win the House, the House Intelligence Committee will be hunting for corruption.

Allison Detzel contributed.

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