Zuckerberg secretly pushed back on Trump's AI regulator plan

Mark Zuckerberg raised objections to a proposed national AI regulator in a phone call with President Trump during the week of August 17, according to Business Insider, which cited a senior White House official familiar with the exchange.

Trump initiated the call himself, and Zuckerberg didn't ask him to scrap the plan outright; he argued instead that any appointees to the body should reflect Trump's own light-touch approach to AI oversight.

The plan being discussed is one that will give rise to an independent oversight mechanism based on the model of FINRA, which is the organisation that oversees broker-dealers in America under SEC oversight.

Google’s DeepMind chief executive officer, Demis Hassabis, came up with this idea in July via an essay he wrote, describing this as a means of assessing cutting-edge models prior to widespread deployment for cybersecurity purposes and beyond. Officials at the White House have been briefing Trump and other leading AI labs such as Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic on this.

Former White House AI advisor David Sacks has pushed a different model entirely: a voluntary industry body similar to the Motion Picture Association, which sets film ratings without direct government enforcement.

Sacks has openly mocked the FINRA approach, describing it on his podcast as a system that would leave AI models "lined up in a queue" for approval. He says Elon Musk backs his version instead.

This isn't the first instance of a private conversation with Trump derailing carefully built AI policy. In May, Sacks reportedly convinced Trump to cancel a planned AI executive order with one phone call on the morning of its signing ceremony.