Trump’s AI agenda hands Silicon Valley the win—while ethics, safety, and ‘woke AI’ get left behind; Fortune, July 24, 2025

 SHARON GOLDMAN, Fortune; Trump’s AI agenda hands Silicon Valley the win—while ethics, safety, and ‘woke AI’ get left behind

"For the “accelerationists”—those who believe the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence should be pursued as quickly as possible—innovation, scale, and speed are everything. Over-caution and regulation? Ill-conceived barriers that will actually cause more harm than good. They argue that faster progress will unlock massive economic growth, scientific breakthroughs, and national advantage. And if superintelligence is inevitable, they say, the U.S. had better get there first—before rivals like China’s authoritarian regime.

AI ethics and safety has been sidelined

This worldview, articulated by Marc Andreessen in his 2023 blog post, has now almost entirely displaced the diverse coalition of people who worked on AI ethics and safety during the Biden Administration—from mainstream policy experts focused on algorithmic fairness and accountability, to the safety researchers in Silicon Valley who warn of existential risks. While they often disagreed on priorities and tone, both camps shared the belief that AI needed thoughtful guardrails. Today, they find themselves largely out of step with an agenda that prizes speed, deregulation, and dominance.

Whether these groups can claw their way back to the table is still an open question. The mainstream ethics folks—with roots in civil rights, privacy, and democratic governance—may still have influence at the margins, or through international efforts. The existential risk researchers, once tightly linked to labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, still hold sway in academic and philanthropic circles. But in today’s environment—where speed, scale, and geopolitical muscle set the tone—both camps face an uphill climb. If they’re going to make a comeback, I get the feeling it won’t be through philosophical arguments. More likely, it would be because something goes wrong—and the public pushes back."