According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, there's a quiet but massive fissure growing within the Trump White House over the rapidly growing dangers and increasingly terrifying warnings surrounding unregulated artificial intelligence.
A rapidly growing number of experts and other high-profile figures within the AI industry have begun to publicly warn that if artificial intelligence is not regulated soon, the technology could quite literally wipe out the human race in a matter of years.
After a last-minute phone call from White House advisor David Sacks in May, Donald Trump scrapped an executive order in the ninth hour that would have significantly tightened government oversight of new AI models being cranked out by massive developers like Anthropic and OpenAI.
Incidentally enough, wouldn't you know, Sacks -- who once worked as Donald Trump's personal AI and crypto czar before transitioning into a co-chair position of the president's tech advisory council in March -- has maintained a heavy hand in the writing of rules for both AI and crypto, while also maintaining significant financial ties to a venture capital firm with monumental stakes in both industries.
Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, worked diligently to persuade Trump to sign a far more limited version of that executive order.
But they know it's not enough.
Since May, Wiles and Bessent have met with various other officials and aides who are also fearful of the lack of safeguards surrounding AI development, according to the Journal. Now, even National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross has joined efforts to pressure the president into taking a much stronger approach to oversight and regulation.
Q: Have you ever used AI yourself?
Trump: Yeah, I use AI.
Q: How do you use AI?
Trump: You can use AI for a lot of things.
Q: What do you use AI for?
Trump: I don’t want to tell you that. pic.twitter.com/FkNBQGdsWe— Acyn (@Acyn) September 13, 2026
As Trump faces pressure and fears to crack down on AI from inside his White House before it's too far gone, he's facing opposite mounting pressure from the billionaire tech bros on the outside, including the likes of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, and former DOGE hatchet man Elon Musk, who join Sacks in demanding less government oversight and scrutiny.
As we're all painfully aware by now, the Sacks team is winning out with the president.
Earlier this week, the president penned a Truth Social post in which he declared that the "only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT," calling the dire warnings about AI's unregulated development a "HOAX" in a separate post earlier that same day.
While Trump is clearly confident that he can serve as a proverbial AI God, his top aides clearly are not, as the Journal reports that a "quiet freakout" is rapidly spreading throughout his inner circle.
