Trump’s AI wager meets a safety reckoning

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company‘s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X @thesullivan. A dangerous moment for the politics of AI Generative AI is coming of age under a president who has made keeping the government away from AI model development a central part of his technology policy. Donald Trump entered office with unusually strong backing from the tech industry: Amazon, Meta, and Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, were among those who donated $1 million apiece to his inauguration. On Trump’s very first day back in office, he revoked Biden’s AI executive order, which had required developers of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems to share certain safety-testing results with the federal government. That day in January 2025, the most capable AI models included Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4o. Today’s frontier models are far more…