Skin in the Game: Trump Family's AI Fortunes Swell as the White House Blocks Guardrails

On Monday, President Trump took to Truth Social to declare that artificial intelligence needs no external oversight of any kind. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades,” he wrote, adding that “there is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers.” It was the opening salvo of a week of aggressively pro-industry posts — and, according to twin investigations published this weekend by The Guardian and The Washington Post, it coincided with a financial reality that ethics watchdogs say has no modern precedent: the family and inner circle of the president setting AI policy are also among its fastest-growing beneficiaries.

A portfolio that tracks the policy

The Guardian’s accounting, published Saturday, sketches the family’s expanding footprint. Through a series of AI-linked defense and technology ventures, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have, over the past year, been associated with a $620 million Pentagon loan to rare-earth magnet startup Vulcan Elements — the largest ever issued by the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital — a $24 million Marine Corps robotics contract at Foundation Future Industries, where Eric Trump serves as chief strategy adviser, and an Air Force drone deal with Powerus, a venture backed by both brothers that also holds a $90 million contract and a new agreement with Pakistan’s army.

The timing of the Vulcan loan has drawn the sharpest scrutiny. A ProPublica investigation found that three months before the December announcement, 1789 Capital — the venture firm where Trump Jr. is a partner — quietly took a stake in the company. The loan request, ProPublica reported, originated not with Vulcan or the Pentagon but with Peter Navarro, a senior White House adviser and close friend of Trump Jr., and Pentagon staff were instructed to move at an “unusually rapid pace.” “The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” one person involved in the deal told the outlet. Trump Jr.’s spokesman, the Pentagon and Vulcan have all maintained that he played no role in the deal and that the company received no political favoritism.

The brothers’ activities extend well beyond defense. Last year they joined investment firm Dominari Holdings to launch American Data Centers Inc., an AI infrastructure venture — weeks after their father unveiled a $20 billion datacenter pledge from Emirati billionaire Hussain Sajwani and $500 billion in planned private AI investment. Trump Jr. also partnered with 1789 Capital to close a $1.2 billion fund focused on digital infrastructure including data centers. And Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent of Truth Social, has announced a merger with a nuclear fusion company positioned to profit from the electricity demand that AI datacenters are driving.

The president’s own brokerage account

The Washington Post’s analysis, based on the president’s financial disclosures, adds a dimension that distinguishes this administration from every recent predecessor: Trump himself continues to trade. His investment accounts have disclosed nearly 30,000 securities transactions since his return to the White House — including purchases of Dell Technologies, Micron Technology and GE Vernova, three companies whose profits are directly tied to the computing and power infrastructure underpinning AI. Unlike recent presidents, Trump has not placed his assets in a blind trust.

The pattern reaches the president’s friends. Michael Dell, a member of Trump’s science and technology advisory council and a longtime friend and donor, saw his company win a Pentagon contract worth nearly $9 billion in May — prompting ethics watchdogs to question whether his advisory role created an unaddressed conflict.

The advisers shaping the policy

Perhaps the most consequential overlap involves David Sacks, who co-chairs Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. In May, Sacks reportedly persuaded the president in a last-minute call to scrap a planned executive order that would have subjected AI models to extended government review — overriding Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who had spent months negotiating the stronger version. At a Politico summit on Wednesday, Sacks dismissed the recent risk warnings from Anthropic and OpenAI as “political theater” and argued existing laws are largely sufficient.

Sacks’s venture firm, the Wall Street Journal has reported, holds stakes in SpaceX and a range of AI startups, along with earlier investments in Meta, Palantir and Airbnb; federal ethics rules required him to divest only some of those holdings during his tenure as AI and crypto czar, a post he left in March. Some administration officials have privately examined whether Sacks could personally benefit from blocking new AI rules. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang also personally lobbied Trump against a proposed industry-funded AI oversight body last month, helping shelve the plan.

The counterargument — and the caveats

The full picture is more nuanced than the headline numbers suggest. A Washington Post analysis in July found that 15 companies tied to the brothers’ investment funds have generated at least $3.2 billion in direct federal business since their involvement — but SpaceX and Anduril account for 97% of that figure, and 10 of the 15 companies already had government business before the Trump sons invested. Excluding those two giants, the remaining 13 companies have drawn $103 million in direct federal funding and nearly $1.8 billion in long-term commitments. The White House, for its part, frames its resistance to regulation chiefly as competitiveness policy: Trump and officials including Sacks argue that new rules could slow US AI development in the race against China.

Public opinion is moving the other way

The political backdrop is shifting under the industry’s feet. A poll released Wednesday found that just 11% of Americans support an AI datacenter being built in their own community, while 65% oppose one — including 52% of Republicans — and 57% say Trump has handled the AI issue poorly, up seven points since March. The same day, the House voted 417-3 to require datacenters to bear the costs of the electricity-grid upgrades their operations demand, a rare supermajority signal that infrastructure costs have moved from polling into lawmaking. Concerns are also coming from inside the labs: in early September, researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from frontier training work with a warning that both OpenAI and Anthropic are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” and Anthropic’s head of AI safety, Mrinank Sharma, resigned the same week, writing that “the world is in peril.”

What happens next

Democratic lawmakers last month asked the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate whether the department’s safeguards can distinguish a routine contractor from a company whose investors include the president’s son — the Pentagon’s own account currently makes no such distinction. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called the Foundation Future Industries award “corruption in plain sight.” And next week, Trump is set to host the leaders of the country’s top AI companies at the White House, in a meeting arranged with House Speaker Mike Johnson that will coincide with a visit from Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The core question the investigations leave unresolved — and that no one in the administration has answered head-on — is the one The Guardian put plainly: it is not clear that financial interests are driving White House AI policy, but the two have moved in remarkable parallel, at precisely the moment the president insists the industry needs nothing but his own judgment to keep it safe.