Major AI company leaders are divided over industry regulation, with OpenAI and Anthropic pushing for oversight while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have blocked proposals for an independent regulator, according to a report published this week by The Verge. The conflict comes as President Trump has labeled recent AI safety concerns a "hoax" and declared that the only controls AI needs are "a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT." At the start of the week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed a three-step plan to slow AI development through third-party evaluators embedded in labs, domestic industry coordination, and international agreements with potential government help, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and Musk initially appearing to support aspects of the approach.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Zuckerberg, Musk, and Huang blocked industry proposals for an independent AI regulator modeled after the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a private nonprofit that oversees finance. Zuckerberg wrote on X that "every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely," distancing himself from calls for a slowdown. Trump made headlines last week by telling a crowd over speakerphone that "the robots will not be taking over" and posting on social media that his administration has already "stopped AI 'people' from doing bad, or potentially bad, 'things'" using "tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies." He denounced what he called a "SICK conspiracy" against AI and data centers, warning that "Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE."

"People want to know AI is being developed safely," Chris Lehane, OpenAI's global affairs chief, told The Verge. "That begins with the steps companies like ours take on our own, but government has an important role too." Anthropic's Amodei wrote in his essay that the company has "always … advocat[ed] for well-considered regulation of AI, even when this gets us accused of hype, 'doomerism', or regulatory capture." An AI venture capitalist who requested anonymity compared the moment to earlier technologies like cars and airplanes, saying "the industry had to come together to find a way to say, 'How do we collectively embrace what safety means?'" and noting that safety standards "actually made technology more widespread."

Nick Reese, an adjunct professor at New York University and the Department of Homeland Security's former director of emerging tech policy, said Trump's current anti-regulation stance is puzzling because he worked with the first Trump administration to develop Executive Order 13960, which Trump signed and has not repealed, centered on protecting "privacy, civil rights, [and] civil liberties" in federal AI use. AI-industry blogger Zvi Mowshowitz noted that Trump isn't fully anti-regulation, having imposed some restrictions like pre-release testing by the government on frontier labs, but is driven more by "vibes" than consistent policy and "not yet buying this 'existential risk' thing." Reese said the administration's positions have been "wobbly and inconsistent," resulting in AI safety being framed as a "doomsday scenario where the robots are coming to get us" when "the core problem is that we have AI that is not physical or embodied in a robot that is hurting humans now."

Reese said opposition to regulation relies on a "tired" idea that oversight always harms innovation, but pointed out that "we regulate things that we can tolerate no failure on … like the financial sector or airlines" to prevent harm to life or systemic damage. As the technology advances and public pushback grows through protests, boycotts, and outcry over concentrated power, calls for regulation are increasing, and that pressure could shift Trump's current position. The regulatory window remains open despite the administration's inconsistency, and the industry's internal battle over autonomy versus accountability will likely intensify as AI capabilities expand. Companies betting against oversight may find themselves navigating a landscape where public demand for guardrails eventually outweighs executive resistance, regardless of which political priorities dominate today's headlines.