What does OpenAI really want from Trump?

When AI giant OpenAI submitted its “freedom-focused” policy proposal to the White House’s AI Action Plan last Thursday, it gave the Trump administration an industry wishlist: use trade laws to export American AI dominance against the looming threat of China, loosen copyright restrictions for training data (also to fight China), invest untold billions in AI infrastructure (again: China), and stop states from smothering it with hundreds of new laws.

But specifically, one law: SB 1047, California’s sweeping, controversial, and for now, defeated AI safety bill.

Hundreds of AI-related bills are flooding state governments nationwide, and hundreds or even thousands are expected by the end of 2025, a regulatory deluge the AI industry is trying to dodge. Broad safety regulations like SB 1047 are particularly threatening, posing a perhaps existential threat to OpenAI. Strikingly absent, however, is any notion of how AI should be governed — or whether it should be governed at all.

“OpenAI’s proposal for preemption, just to be totally candid with you, it confuses me a little bit, as someone who’s thought about this issue a lot,” Dean Ball of the libertarian Mercatus Center to …

Read the full story at The Verge.