Trump taps Jay Clayton as AI czar: What we know about his views

I think it's very telling if you think about who the previous AI czar was for the White House, David Sacks, a venture capitalist from Silicon Valley, very much in that entire tech sphere. You've now gone to someone who was the former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US, a former regulator as well. And so, I think it shows you a direction of travel in which the government is realizing that this technology is very powerful and there needs to be an understanding about what to do next. But that doesn't necessarily mean new regulation. And I think that's very, very critical here. You've seen companies like Anthropic and OpenAI say, "Hey, we need new regulation. We need to be regulated." You've seen Donald Trump and and his administration say, "We don't need new regulation." And what we've heard from Jay Clayton prior to his appointment, he was on CNBC about a week ago, saying that he believes the SEC and the CFTC currently could be good enough to regulate these companies without the need for any new kind of formal kind of body to regulate these companies. So, it's early days here. I think he has 120 days now to come up with uh opportunities, risks around AI, and then make some recommendation as to what the role of the federal government should be in regulating these companies. But at the moment as it stands, what we know is he believes perhaps the two current big bodies in the US can regulate. And of course, President Trump doesn't clearly doesn't want any regulation around this new technology as well. >> that's that's when the rubber really hits the road, isn't it? And just how balanced is his approach to the regulatory environment and the rule book and how independent is he going to be because we know in the Trump administration, whether it's the banks or whether it's with the Clarity Act and the crypto assets, President Trump has always favored a lighter hand. >> Yeah, and that and he has very much came out and said he believes that that the industry should self-regulate. And there is a lot of debate around whether that should be the case. Can we trust these companies developing what is potentially the most powerful technology we've ever seen before to police themselves. And and even the companies that have come out and say we we can't really do that. There's been debates around should we slow down the pace of development, but actually how do you get an industry to agree with that? And then there's the broader geopolitical debates around this entire race narrative with with China in particular. And if the US industry itself slows down, does that give China the opening to catch up? I mean, we've already seen the massive advances by Chinese AI models, open-source models that are already very much in spitting distance with with what the US is producing.