White House Adviser Says Trump Won’t Create ‘FDA for AI’

The White House’s outgoing artificial intelligence adviser says the administration won’t require formal licensing for the technology.

“There will not be an FDA for AI,” Sriram Krishnan said in an interview with the Financial Times (FT) Friday (July 3), in reference to the Food and Drug Administration.

“This administration, [the] president, from day one has been against burdensome, onerous, bureaucratic red tape. We are not in the business of picking winners and losers.”

Krishnan said establishing a centralized agency requiring “a team of lawyers before you can get a model out” would put “sand in the gears” of AI progress.

“That is never, never going to happen under President Trump,” he said.

As the FT noted, his prediction comes weeks after the federal government’s “unprecedented intervention” in forcing Anthropic to pull the latest version of its Mythos model, while also pausing the launch of OpenAI’s 5.6.

The report added that Krishnan, a former venture capitalist who worked with Elon Musk before joining the White House, had been among those in the administration championing a more laissez-faire approach to AI regulation.

According to the FT, some corners of Washington say the administration’s passion for deregulation has helped fuel rising public backlash against AI.

The report cited findings from researcher Data Center Watch showing a majority of Americans support tough AI regulations, while at least 75 data center projects were halted by local opposition in the first three months of the year.

In other AI news, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that companies are using the technology across more parts of their operation than ever, while placing less trust in AI to act on its own.

Research from the PYMNTS Intelligence report “Wholesale Writes the AI Playbook: How Goods Firms Are Scaling Intelligence Across the Enterprise” shows that a wide majority of companies limit AI agents to “look-up access” which means the agent can retrieve information but is not permitted to act on it.

That was true for 100% of wholesale firms surveyed, 90% of retailers and 85% of construction companies. Not a single company in any sub-industry fully permits autonomous AI action.

“The restriction is not a sign that AI deployment has stalled,” PYMNTS wrote last week. “The picture is of companies that have embedded AI broadly for research, analysis and document generation, and drawn a line before execution.”

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