Silicon Valley's power brokers spent the past year currying favor with President Trump. Two deadly shootings in Minneapolis are now exposing the price of that bargain. It was November 12, 2016, four days after Donald Trump won his first presidential election. Aside from a few outliers (looking at you, Peter Thiel), almost everyone in the tech world was shocked and appalled. At a conference I attended that Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was " a pretty crazy idea " to think that his company had anything to do with the outcome.

A technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI datacenter in New Carlisle, Indiana, on 2 October 2025. A technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI datacenter in New Carlisle, Indiana, on 2 October 2025. At Davos, tech CEOs laid out their vision for AI's world domination Tech chiefs waxed poetic about AI to delegates at Davos. Plus, the'human' drama of AI startups and why Tesla is thriving in Texas This week's edition is a team effort: my colleague Heather Stewart reports on the plans for AI's world domination at Davos; I examine how huge investments have followed AI companies with little to their names but drama and dreams; and Nick Robins-Early spotlights how lax regulation of autonomous driving in Texas allowed Tesla to thrive. When they weren't discussing Donald Trump, delegates at the World Economic Forum last week were being dazzled by the prospects for artificial intelligence.

Trump to host Big Tech CEOs in White House's redone rose garden U.S. President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, are hosting an artificial intelligence event for tech CEOs on Thursday at the newly renovated garden. Tech industry leaders including Meta Platforms's Mark Zuckerberg, Apple's Tim Cook, and Microsoft's Satya Nadella are expected to attend an artificial intelligence event hosted by U.S. first lady Melania Trump on Thursday and then join U.S. President Donald Trump for an evening reception in the White House's newly renovated rose garden. Other attendees are expected to include OpenAI's Sam Altman, Alphabet's Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, a White House official said. Alexandr Wang, who recently joined Meta's AI effort, is also among the invitees. The first lady announced last month that she was launching a presidential challenge to encourage students to use emerging AI technology to find solutions to community challenges. The effort will also encourage educators to adopt AI in the classroom, the White House has said.

Even as Silicon Valley races to build more powerful artificial intelligence models, public opinion on the other side of the Atlantic remains decidedly skeptical of the influence of tech CEOs when it comes to regulating the sector, with the vast majority of Britons worried about the safety of new AI systems. The concerns, highlighted in a new poll shared exclusively with TIME, come as world leaders and tech bosses--from U.S. Vice President JD Vance, France's Emmanuel Macron and India's Narendra Modi to OpenAI chief Sam Altman and Google's Sundar Pichai--prepare to gather in Paris next week to discuss the rapid pace of developments in AI. The new poll shows that 87% of Brits would back a law requiring AI developers to prove their systems are safe before release, with 60% in favor of outlawing the development of "smarter-than-human" AI models. Just 9%, meanwhile, said they trust tech CEOs to act in the public interest when discussing AI regulation. The survey was conducted by the British pollster YouGov on behalf of Control AI, a non-profit focused on AI risks.

The deposed tech CEO returning to his company triumphant is enough of a Silicon Valley trope that they made it part of the HBO sitcom literally called Silicon Valley. Thomas Middleditch's character wants to build a consumer-facing product, and his startup's board of directors wants to sell to businesses, and Middleditch's character gets fired and goes away until the board is ready to do what he wants. He comes back after a few weeks, probably, although it's hard to say on account of it not being real. More famously, Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 after a board struggle that resulted in his being pushed out. Jobs needed 12 years, and Apple's decision to buy a company he'd started in the meantime, to come home in 1997.

Well, that didn't happen, obviously. I sat down with MIT professor Max Tegmark, the founder and president of FLI, to take stock of what has happened since. Here are highlights of our conversation. On shifting the Overton window on AI risk: Tegmark told me that in conversations with AI researchers and tech CEOs, it had become clear that there was a huge amount of anxiety about the existential risk AI poses, but nobody felt they could speak about it openly "for fear of being ridiculed as Luddite scaremongerers." "The key goal of the letter was to mainstream the conversation, to move the Overton window so that people felt safe expressing these concerns," he says.

Taipei, Taiwan – Artificial intelligence poses a "risk of extinction" that calls for global action, leading computer scientists and technologists have warned. "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," a group of AI experts and other high-profile figures said in a brief statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a San Francisco-based research and advocacy group, on Tuesday. The signatories include technology experts such as Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, Geoffrey Hinton, known as the "godfather of AI", and Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister, as well as other notable figures including the neuroscientist Sam Harris and the musician Grimes. The warning follows an open letter signed by Elon Musk and other high-profile figures in March that called for a six-month pause on the development of AI more advanced than OpenAI's GPT-4. "Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter said.

The Biden administration's investment in responsible AI research and development is a $140 million grant, which will increase the number of national AI research institutes. These institutes are focused on advancing artificial intelligence research in areas ranging from public health to cybersecurity. The investment is just a fraction of the billions that private sector companies are pouring into advancing the technology. Microsoft previously invested $10 billion in OpenAI.

Fox News correspondent Matt Finn has the latest on the impact of AI technology that some say could outpace humans on'Special Report.' One of the tech CEOs who signed a letter calling for a six-month pause on AI labs training powerful systems warned that such technology threatens "human extinction." "As stated by many, including these model's developers, the risk is human extinction," Connor Leahy, CEO of Conjecture, a company that describes itself as working to make "AI systems boundable, predictable and safe," told Fox News Digital this week. Leahy is one of more than 2,000 experts and tech leaders who signed a letter this week calling for "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4." The letter is backed by Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, as well as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and argues that "AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity."

Technology companies are racing to develop human-level artificial intelligence, whose development poses one of the greatest risks to humanity. Last week, John Carmack, a software engineer and video game developer, announced that he has raised 20 million dollars to start Keen Technologies, a company devoted to building fully human-level AI. He is not the only one. There are currently 72 projects around the world focused on developing a human-level AI, also known as an AGI -- meaning an AI which can do any cognitive task at least as well as humans can. Many have raised concerns about the effects that even today's use of artificial intelligence, which is far from human-level, already has on our society.