What Trump's victory means for crypto and AI
regulation
The election of Donald Trump likely precedes a much lighter regulatory environment for tech.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump was officially elected the 47th President of the United States. And, as anyone who has been on X the past few weeks can attest, the tech industry played no small part in his victory.
As such, people are now wondering what Trump’s win means for tech regulation, especially with the ‘hot’ industries of crypto and AI.
That’s what we’re covering in this article.
Crypto
To say that the crypto industry helped cause the red wave would be an understatement. The crypto lobby used over $100M to help elect pro-crypto candidates, including a majority in the House of Representatives and the President-elect himself. They even spent $40M just to unseat the famously anti-crypto Senator Sherrod Brown.
Trump has not always been a fan of crypto, but for one reason or another, he has dramatically changed his tune. Now, he is the crypto President, pledging to:
Never sell the government’s stash of bitcoin.
Explore creating a national strategic reserve of bitcoin, which means buying bitcoin with government funds.
Fire Gary Gensler, the SEC Chairman who is very opposed to crypto, on day one (which he actually can’t technically do).
Create a bitcoin and crypto presidential advisory council.
Work for all future bitcoin to be mined (created) in America.
Basically, American crypto regulation is about to get much laxer. This means more ETFs like the ones already approved for bitcoin and ethereum, more crypto startups, and, hopefully for all of us with investments, higher prices.
Kristin Smith, the CEO of crypto lobbying firm Blockchain Association, sums it up nicely, “This is a huge victory for crypto.”
AI
As with crypto, Trump will likely have a relaxing effect on AI regulation.
The main thing he wants to do is repeal Biden’s AI Executive Order (EO) focused on AI safety and security and replace it with his own EO that focuses on boosting AI military technology and reducing regulations.
This would mean the death of the US AI Safety Institute and the requirements for AI companies to submit reports on their training methodologies and security measures, which have been much maligned by Republicans for discouraging innovation.
One wild card in this plan is Elon Musk. The tech mogul is a major Trump backer and a consistent supporter of AI regulation. Only he knows whether that is because of a love for AI safety or a desire for his AI company to benefit from regulatory capture. Still, the fact remains he is not a typical Trump voter when it comes to AI regulation.
Along with the uncertainty over Elon, there is also uncertainty about how proposed policies like a blanket 10% tariff on imports and a restriction on H-1B visas will impact AI. It could have no effect, or it could slow down the supply of GPUs and talent to the point that AI development grinds to a halt. There’s just no way to know at the moment.
Ultimately, though, it appears that Trump’s victory will lead to a much lighter regulatory environment.
Deregulating AI sounds like an abysmal idea for anyone with less than a Billion dollars. No regulations on how the resources and data is used means a handful of people will own all resources and can do whatever they want with the data that goes through them, whether you know what data is being collected or not. Your little business? You are not part of the club!
This is worth so much to them that they will certainly make everyone feel so lucky to have access to the tools for "free". It's not AI Overlords we have to worry about, it's AI Oligarchs.
Shrug this off as conspiracy I guess, but I'm just talking about what has always happened. Can you give me ONE reason they will magically not do what every single billionaire has done throughout human history, which is whatever they can get away with?
Yeah, this is true, we'll all be slaves to the Big Tech companies that own AI.
It's a complicated question. I'm with you on the one hand, but on the other hand I'm wary of too much regulation because of the risk of regulatory capture.
This is why I'm actually hopefully bullish on decentralized AI and projects like Bittensor and Grass.
Between this and Jpowell - it's going to be a wild ride. Hopefully Eth also gets the memo
ETH seems to be waking up the last couple of days!
it will be very interesting to see how it will be looks like.
Interesting correlation between both Crypto and AI - wouldn't normally think about them in the same regard to regulations. I'd agree that we're headed towards lighter regulations here - will be interesting to see how it plays out.
great read - with X on track to be the everything app, do you think they'll prioritize crypto over banks for payments, seeing it is becoming popular?
I remember Stripe made a large acquisition with regards to that a couple of weeks ago. They seem to be embracing crypto.
I'm fairly new to this subject, looking to read some books and get a better understanding.
I think if X actually started to integrate payments, I'd think they definitely have a crypto option. My guess would be some mix of USDC and Doge considering how much Elon loves Doge.
A great book to get into crypto is Read, Write, Own by Chris Dixon.