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How Trump’s tech advisers overcame a MAGA rebellion over AI

President Donald Trump was flanked by his tech advisers last week as he signed an executive order limiting states’ power to regulate artificial intelligence, capping weeks of debate that split his supporters and highlighted the growing influence of his Silicon Valley allies over his agenda.

Populist forces within the Republican Party mounted an extensive campaign to derail the action after a draft of the order leaked last month, arguing that fears over AI’s potential to automate jobs would undermine the party’s messaging to workers. A handful of tech leaders neutralized those fears for now, convincing the president, a longtime real estate developer, that burdensome regulation could cripple the industry.

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The episode provided new evidence that a broader power struggle over the future of technology is playing out inside the administration, as officials confront high-stakes decisions that touch everything from national security and jobs to online safety for children, according to more than a dozen White House officials and people familiar with the administration’s AI policies. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations.

The debate over Trump’s AI policies reflect a simmering rift between the populists and technology businessmen who together helped send Trump to the White House for a second time - discord that was commonplace in the president’s first administration but has been largely absent from this one. The order he signed Thursday marked the second major win in a week for Trump’s powerful and wealthy tech allies.

On Monday, Trump said he would allow industry titan Nvidia to export H200 chips to China in a setback for China hard-liners who warned the move could accelerate the foreign competitor’s AI development. The decision also rattled some longtime MAGA loyalists, already uneasy over his plans to expand high-skilled immigration at the urging of tech leaders seeking foreign talent - a split, with midterms less than a year away, that could strain the unusual coalition that helped deliver Trump the White House in 2024.

Some Republicans successfully squashed an effort in Congress this summer to implement a 10-year moratorium on state AI laws, and they were primed for a fight when a draft of the executive order - intended to avert a patchwork of laws - leaked.

As Trump signaled support for limits on states’ abilities to regulate AI, some staff in the White House became frustrated with the approach of Trump’s White House AI czar David Sacks and AI adviser Sriram Krishnan, two well-known Silicon Valley investors. Outside groups provided alternative executive orders to staff in key White House offices, sparking confusion among lobbyists and activists, who didn’t know which order the White House was actually considering.

The draft from Sacks would create a legal task force to challenge state laws that are inconsistent with the Trump administration’s goal to sustain global dominance in AI - sparking fears among some conservatives and AI safety advocates that the administration could challenge state laws intended to protect children online or regulate data centers amid concerns about rising energy bills. The alternative proposals included a more narrowly tailored order to specifically challenge state laws that conservatives fear could lead to “woke AI.”

Governors, members of Congress and conservative advocacy groups called the White House to raise their concerns. Publicly, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and conservative commentator Stephen K. Bannon derided the order in posts on X and in podcasts.

“All of this is viewed as a family intervention of people who actually love the president,” said one person who opposed the order, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversations.

The person said many in the GOP base are struggling with the president’s alignment with tech leaders who have given generously to his political operations and White House ballroom project - noting the contrast from his campaign when he shoveled fries at McDonald’s.

“It feels like millions of votes across the country just got traded for thousands of [venture capitalist] and tech rich votes in regions Republicans will never win.”

White House spokesman Kush Desai said Trump was focused on ensuring America delivers “cutting-edge technologies of the future - without compromising on our national security.”

“While the president regularly interacts with business and tech leaders toward this end, the only special interest guiding his ultimate decision-making is the best interest of the American people,” he said.

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Overcoming the divide

Sacks and Krishnan worked overtime to meet the concerns of GOP leaders, messaging to lobbyists, governors and their staffs that the proposal was not an assault on state’s rights.

On a recent call with Republican state executives, including Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had previously criticized efforts in Congress to preempt state AI laws, Sacks said the effort would avoid a confusing patchwork of different state AI laws. He also raised concerns about existing laws in blue states, particularly a law in Colorado that requires developers to protect against algorithmic bias when using AI to make decisions related to hiring, housing and loans.

Sacks and Krishnan also met with Mike Davis, a conservative political activist who wrote a Fox News op-ed warning that lawmakers needed to stop “Big Tech’s AI amnesty scam” amid the growing effort to create policies that would curb states’ ability to craft their own AI laws.

Trump spoke by phone with Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), who pulled her support for the effort to include a 10-year moratorium on state AI laws in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. In representing a state with a large music industry, Blackburn has raised concerns about AI systems’ impact on musicians and copyrighted music. Additionally, Krishnan fielded feedback from Sen. Maria Cantwell (Washington), the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee.

Following the discussions, Sacks released a post on X on Monday intended to address the concerns of this coalition. He emphasized that the order would not override legislators’ ability to address the “4 Cs” - child safety, communities (a reference to data centers), creators and censorship. For weeks, Davis had warned in conservative media appearances that legislators needed to maintain their rights to legislate in these areas.

The tech advisers ultimately updated the language of their draft to specify that the administration would advocate for federal AI legislation that would not preempt states’ abilities to pass children’s safety laws or craft local policies governing data centers.

“The administration understands the various concerns stakeholders have about federal preemption, and we believe the EO took these concerns into account,” Sacks told The Washington Post.

Ultimately, this effort appeared to assuage some of the concerns of the order’s initial critics. On Friday, Davis told Bannon on his “War Room” show that the final version was a win for Trump - not the “tech bros.” Other Republicans who had criticized the initial draft were silent.

Sanders said in a statement that she “looks forward to working with his administration and other stakeholders to make sure we win the race against China and also protect Americans.” A Blackburn spokesperson said in a statement that the senator is leading work on a federal framework that would codify the president’s executive order and protect children, creators and conservatives.

The order is almost certain to face legal challenges from state attorneys general and consumer advocacy groups, some of whom questioned whether the order represented trying an end run on Congress.

“They are pushing for a legally questionable EO because they know their no-guardrails position is so unpopular that they can’t win in Congress,” said Nathan Calvin, vice president of state affairs and general counsel at Encode, a group that advocates for AI restrictions.

Sacks told The Post that the administration would “like to see Congress enact a federal framework, and in the meantime, we’re going to push back on the most excessive state laws, which this EO does.”

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A rising influence

The order and the chip exports announcement last week highlight the immense influence of Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO who first met with Trump in late January, amid rising fears that China was growing more competitive in artificial intelligence following the release of the AI app DeepSeek. Huang, at the helm of a company valued at more than a trillion dollars, had never been in the Oval Office.

The meeting was the first of several attended by the tech CEO, Trump, Sacks and Krishnan. Since then, Huang has become a frequent fixture at the White House, regularly talking to Trump about lifting restrictions on exports of Nvidia’s chips to China. Huang expressed support for an executive order that would limit a growing patchwork of state AI laws in a meeting last month with Sacks and Krishnan. The meeting was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Huang is one of the many tech executives with whom Trump has built relationships and consulted in his second term, along with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other CEOs who surrounded him at his January swearing in. (Bezos is the founder of Amazon and owns The Washington Post.) Democratic lawmakers have criticized the coziness and the donations that many have made to Trump’s White House ballroom project, warning the administration is handing the tech industry too much influence and the leeway to write its own rule book.

National security experts and lawmakers from both parties have criticized Trump’s decision to permit the sale of the H200 chips in China - for which the United States is set to receive 25 percent of sales. A bipartisan groups of lawmakers put forward the GAIN AI Act, which would ensure that U.S. companies get priority to AI chips over companies in China or other countries, and the SAFE Chips Act, which would limit what types of AI chips U.S. companies can sell to China.

“There has been strong bipartisan pushback on this issue,” said Chris McGuire, a National Security Council official during the Biden administration. “There certainly are many people in the administration, including people in the Cabinet, who are deeply skeptical about the idea of selling our most advanced technologies to China.”

One former Trump Commerce official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s policy, said the lack of semiconductor experts among the White House’s officials has made it easier for Huang and Nvidia to sway Trump to their view on chip exports.

“There is no chip expert in the White House. That’s why we’re in the trouble we’re in,” the person said. The person said Trump appears to be making these decisions outside of the usual bureaucratic interagency process for export controls. “This was just a conversation with the president, and they just did it.”

When asked this week about the Nvidia decision, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC that the decision was a deal between Huang and Trump.

“So it’s the great American technologist talking to the great businessman president, and they reached what they thought was the right answer for this particular moment,” Lutnick said.

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Will Oremus contributed to this report.