The Washington Post reports:

President Donald Trump’s sprawling family business empire has become increasingly intertwined with the boom in artificial intelligence, at the same time that he has resisted calls to slow the development of the technology, a Washington Post analysis of his financial disclosures and corporate announcements found.

Several factors play into Trump’s push for rapid AI development: He has surrounded himself with technology executives and investors who have advocated for the government to accelerate AI development, including venture capitalist David Sacks, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang and Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. The president fears ceding an economic and technological advantage to China. And he has celebrated the stock market’s record highs, which are heavily tied to the performance of AI-related firms.

But Trump also has a personal financial stake in industries benefiting from the AI build-out, creating potential conflicts of interest as his administration makes decisions that could affect the value of those investments. Unlike his recent predecessors, Trump has not placed his assets in a blind trust, and he has continued to buy and sell stocks while in office.

“No president since we’ve had this regime of conflict-of-interest statutes has ever conducted their finances this way,” said Don Fox, a former acting director of the Office of Government Ethics in the Obama administration. “His predecessors in the post-Watergate era wanted the American people — whether they agreed with them or not — to believe the president was doing what was in the best interest of his country.” [Continue reading…]