The Trump administration has taken a more hands-off approach to AI, but US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that his administration is now considering asserting more power over artificial intelligence tools after recent cybersecurity incidents. He made the comments after being asked about OpenAI's tools being responsible for improperly breaching the private technology of other companies.
Trump said:
"We're looking at AI, we're looking at controls, we're also making sure that we lead."His remarks mark a change of tone for his administration, which has previously taken a more hands-off approach to the technology.
Trump's comments come after an escalation of not only the apparent hacking capabilities of popular AI tools, but White House threats aimed at competing Chinese tech. He said some kind of control around AI tools was being considered, but added that any move would have to be handled carefully.
"We don't want to restrict them where all of the sudden we come in second to China,"he said. He also said:
"China has virtually no [AI] controls. It's freewheeling a little bit,"Trump added.
The White House has been contacted for additional comment. The BBC has also contacted the Chinese embassy in Washington for comment.
What prompted the White House to reconsider AI controls?
In the last week, OpenAI has taken responsibility for at least two hacking incidents involving its AI tools acting outside of what they were designed and directed to do. During a trip to Washington on Wednesday, OpenAI's chief executive Sam Altman was asked by a reporter if there were more systems that had been breached by the company's tools.
Altman replied:
"I mean, there could be yeah",indicating there may have been additional incidents.
How is the US responding to Chinese AI firms?
The US government intervened when Anthropic, OpenAI's main American rival, decided to release to the public a model that it had previously said was too much of a risk to be made widely available. Meanwhile, in an internal White House memo from April, Trump's senior tech advisor Michael Kratsios accused China's AI firms of
"industrial-scale"theft of US AI technology.
Kratsios repeated the accusation again last week, claiming that the popular Kimi 3 AI model from China's Moonshot AI was developed by stealing information from Anthropic. The Chinese government has consistently rejected such accusations.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also warned that Chinese AI firms could face sanctions for such activity. And the Federal Communications Commission this week banned the importation of new foreign-made humanoid robots.
Why does open source matter in this debate?
Most AI models being developed in China are open source, meaning they are built and then made freely available online for anyone with the proper computer equipment to download and use. Recently, executives from most major US tech companies have signed onto public statements of support for open-source models, external.
As the debate over AI controls continues, the Trump administration is weighing how to respond to security risks without limiting US competition in the sector or giving China an advantage.
