At San Francisco's Tech Week, venture capitalists and AI founders welcomed the White House's hands-off approach to artificial intelligence regulation, saying it will boost profits for AI-powered defense and security firms, the Associated Press reports.
The reaction follows President Trump's September 29 ceremonial signing of a voluntary 308-word AI safety pact, signed by OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, SpaceXAI and Nvidia. Industry leaders framed the light-touch stance as a green light for American AI dominance.
Critics pushed back hard. Former FTC adviser Sarah Myers West called self-regulation a proven failure, warning that voluntary pledges have repeatedly collapsed under commercial pressure. The divide sets up one of the defining policy fights of the AI era: who, if anyone, gets to write the rules.
