This Is Donald Trump’s AI Brain Trust

As China’s open-weight AI models become increasingly powerful, the Trump administration is relying on a small group of officials to decide whether and what restrictions should be imposed.

The group is scattered across several departments and agencies in Washington—and they all have differing views on the best way to keep the US ahead in the race against China.

“It’s not an argument with two sides, it’s an argument with ten sides,” one senior White House official tells WIRED about the state of affairs.

With little interagency coordination in the administration, policy will almost certainly end up being set by the people with the most influence with the president. In an effort to map the forces at play, here’s a list of the current power brokers involved in the race to regulate AI.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick

Howard Lutnick has increasingly emerged as an influential part of the intra-administration split over AI, in part because it oversees export controls through the Bureau of Industry and Security.

Lutnick, according to people familiar, has contemplated ways to create incentives for top US labs to create their own open-weight models to counterbalance China, and he has spoken with leaders at a number of AI labs.

On Thursday, Lutnick played down the capabilities of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model, writing in an X post that his team found it performed worse than leading US frontier models in key benchmark tests.

Lutnick appears to be straddling a middle ground on regulation. He imposed export controls on Anthropic to bring them to heel—but has been more freewheeling than others in the White House.

Arvind Raman, Acting Director, CAISI

Arvind Raman has become Lutnick’s top deputy as the acting chief at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, which sits inside the Commerce Department and serves as the industry’s primary point of contact with the government.

He assumed the job last week after his predecessor, Chris Fall, abruptly resigned after spending weeks trying to get Anthropic to add stronger safeguards to prevent jailbreaks of its most powerful Fable 5 model.

CAISI staff were in meetings with Anthropic’s technical teams for weeks as both sides hammered out new safeguards that were deemed strong enough for Fable 5 to be brought back online, WIRED previously reported.

National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross

Sean Cairncross has taken a more hardline approach towards Chinese AI labs.

Cairncross has an outsized role in potential attempts to regulate Chinese AI, and he is empowered at the White House to develop a policy to counter the potential national security risks of AI. He helped put together President Donald Trump’s June 2 executive order that laid out a framework to assess the most powerful AI models.

A former political campaign lawyer who most recently was at the Republican National Committee, Cairncross lacks any tech or AI experience.

But current and former staff credit him with trying to grapple with the hard national security problems posed by AI, and allowing his staff to work without micromanaging every problem in a manner a tech software engineer might.

In particular, Cairncross and his chief of staff, Lara Smith, have been focused on curbing Chinese labs from training their models off the backs of top US models in a practice called distillation.

In response to a request for comment, White House spokesperson Elizabeth Huston says that the administration’s deliberations on Chinese AI are centered on trying to bolster US AI.

“The United States leads the world in AI innovation, and President Trump will keep it that way. The Trump Administration is doubling down on innovation to widen the gap between America and the rest of the world,” says Huston.

Former AI Czar David Sacks

Tech investor David Sacks has remained one of the most influential advisers on AI for Trump, maintaining a direct line to the president even after he departed his role as AI czar in March.

Sacks has been ardent about keeping a hands-off approach for all AI, successfully intervening at the last minute to water down some of the regulatory provisions in the June 2 executive order.

He has been consistent with his more laissez-faire approach to Chinese open-weight AI models as well, using his X account with 1.6 million followers to influence the administration from the outside.

“Secretary Howard Lutnick is right. The Kimi Panic needs to stop. American frontier models are still ahead. When you factor in what’s in the lab, the gap is even larger. As long as we keep releasing, we will stay ahead,” Sacks wrote in an X post on July 23 that had nearly 500,000 views.

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles

As Trump’s top political aide in the process, Susie Wiles has been vetting and scrutinizing policy proposals from all sides before they reach the Oval Office.

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has been taking his department’s positions directly to Wiles, as have Lutnick and Cairncross. Like on other administration issues, Wiles’ decision invariably ends up being final.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent

As the top Trump official in charge of US-China trade relations, Scott Bessent has adopted perhaps the most aggressive stance towards Chinese AI and efforts to distill US models.

In a post on X last week, Bessent repudiated distillation as “IP theft” and threatened Chinese labs with sanctions or inclusion on the Entity List, a trade-restriction list maintained by the US government.

After playing virtually no role in restricting Anthropic last month, Bessent has stepped up his involvement in AI policy ahead of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to the White House in September and an APEC summit in November.

Bessent has told Wiles and others that the US, Europe, Japan, and other Western allies also need to move faster to develop their own open weight models, or else lose the AI race to China, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

While Bessent has been working directly with Wiles at the White House, one of his top deputies, Luke Pettit, has been involved in executing Bessent’s roadmap at a staff level, the person says.

Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the Treasury, Luke Pettit

Luke Pettit has become the point person on AI at the Treasury Department under Bessent. Petit, who was previously a senior policy adviser in the US Senate, is now working alongside the Treasury’s chief information officer and former DOGE member Sam Corcos.

The Treasury Department as a whole has been focused on the risk of AI going rogue, sources say, since a model that even inadvertently closed out trading positions, or accessed sensitive information at banks like Goldman Sachs, could crash the economy.