Major tech firms are pushing the administration of President Donald Trump to loosen rules on building artificial intelligence, arguing it is the only way to maintain a US edge and compete with China. Spooked by generative AI’s sudden advance, governments initially scrambled to develop guardrails, as major tech companies rapidly integrated the technology into their products.Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has shifted focus toward accelerating AI development at all costs, pushing aside concerns about the models suffering hallucinations, producing deepfakes, or destroying human jobs.”The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” Vice President JD Vance told world leaders at a recent AI summit in Paris.This message unsettled international partners, particularly Europe, which had proudly established the EU AI Act as a new standard for keeping the technology in check.But, faced with America’s new direction, European officials are now pivoting their messaging toward investment and innovation rather than safety.”We’re going to see a significant pullback in terms of the regulatory efforts… worldwide,” explained David Danks, professor of data science and philosophy at University of California San Diego. “That certainly has been signaled here in the United States, but we’re also seeing it in Europe.”- ‘Step back’ -Tech companies are capitalizing on this regulatory retreat, seeking the freedom to develop AI technologies that they claim have been too constrained under the Biden administration.One of Trump’s first executive actions was dismantling Biden’s policies, which had proposed modest guardrails for powerful AI models and directed agencies to prepare to oversee the change.”It’s clear that we’re taking a step back from that idea that there’s going to be a coherent overall approach to AI regulation,” noted Karen Silverman, CEO of AI advisory firm Cantellus Group.The Trump administration has invited industry leaders to share their policy vision, emphasizing that the US must maintain its position as the “undeniable leader in AI technology” with minimal investor constraints.The industry submissions will shape the White House’s AI action plan, expected this summer.The request has yielded predictable responses from major players, with a common theme emerging: China represents an existential threat which can only be addressed by plowing an open path for companies unencumbered by regulation.OpenAI’s submission probably goes the furthest in its contrast with China, highlighting DeepSeek, a Chinese-developed generative AI model created at a fraction of American development costs, to emphasize the competitive threat.According to OpenAI, American AI development should be “protected from both autocratic powers that would take people’s freedoms away, and layers of laws and bureaucracy that would prevent our realizing them.”For AI analyst Zvi Mowshowitz, OpenAI’s “goal is to have the federal government not only not regulate AI,” but also ban individual US states from doing so.Currently engaged in litigation with the New York Times over the use of its content for training, OpenAI also argues that restricting access to online data would concede the AI race to China.”Without fair use access to copyrighted material…America loses, as does the success of democratic AI,” OpenAI said.Another response submitted by a group of Hollywood celebrities — including Ben Stiller and Cynthia Erivo — rejected the notion, reflecting the film and television industry’s contentious relationship with the technology.- ‘Essential’ -In its response, Meta touted its open Llama AI model as part of the fight for American technological superiority.”Open source models are essential for the US to win the AI race against China and ensure American AI dominance,” the company stated.CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even advocated for retaliatory tariffs against European regulatory efforts.Google’s input focused on infrastructure investment for AI’s substantial energy requirements. Like its peers, Google also opposes state-by-state regulations in the US that it claims would undermine America’s technological leadership.Despite the push for minimal oversight, industry observers caution that generative AI carries inherent risks, with or without government regulation.”Bad press is universal, and if your technology leads to really bad outcomes, you’re going to get raked over the public relations coals,” warned Danks.Companies have no choice but to mitigate the dangers, he added.

Two US states executed convicted murderers on Thursday, the third and fourth death sentences carried out in the country this week.  In Oklahoma, a man convicted of killing a woman during a home robbery was put to death. And in Florida, another man was executed for the rape and murder of a child and the killing of her grandmother. Wendell Grissom, 56, was sentenced to death in Oklahoma for the 2005 murder of Amber Matthews, 23, who was shot in the head while trying to protect a friend’s two young daughters.Grissom was pronounced dead 10 minutes after the execution process began at the state penitentiary in McAlester, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections said in a statement.It said the execution was carried out using a three-drug protocol: Midazolam, which causes sedation, Vecuronium Bromide, which halts respiration, and Potassium Chloride, which stops the heart.According to court documents, Grissom, a truck driver, and another man, Jessie Johns, broke into the home of Dreu Kopf, a friend of Matthews, with the intention of committing a robbery.Grissom shot and wounded Kopf and killed Matthews while she was hiding in a bedroom in an attempt to shield Kopf’s two children.Johns was sentenced to life in prison without parole.In Florida, Edward James, 63, was also executed by lethal injection, in his case for the 1993 rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl, Toni Neuner, and the murder of Betty Dick, 58, her grandmother.The Florida Department of Corrections announced that James was executed at 8:15 pm Thursday (0015 GMT Friday) at the Florida State Prison in Raiford, outside Jacksonville in the north of the state. – Previous executions -Earlier, on Tuesday this week, Jessie Hoffman, 46, was put to death by nitrogen gas in the southern state of Louisiana.Hoffman, who was convicted of the 1996 rape and murder of Molly Elliott, a  28-year-old advertising executive, was the first person executed in Louisiana in 15 years.Only one other US state, Alabama, has carried out executions by nitrogen hypoxia, which involves pumping nitrogen gas into a facemask, causing the prisoner to suffocate.The method has been denounced by UN experts as cruel and inhumane.  Aaron Gunches, 53, who was sentenced to death for the 2002 murder of Ted Price, his girlfriend’s ex-husband, was executed in Arizona on Wednesday.Gunches had abandoned legal efforts to halt his execution.The vast majority of US executions since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 have been performed using lethal injection, although South Carolina executed a man by firing squad on March 7.There have already been ten executions in the United States this year, following 25 last year.The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while three others — California, Oregon and Pennsylvania — have moratoriums in place.President Donald Trump is a proponent of capital punishment and on his first day in office called for an expansion of its use “for the vilest crimes.”

US President Donald Trump demanded Thursday that courts stop blocking his agenda, edging closer to a constitutional showdown after a judge suggested the administration had ignored an order to block summary deportations.A federal judge, in a strongly worded order, gave the Justice Department until Tuesday to explain why it went ahead with flights to El Salvador of prison-bound Venezuelan migrants, some of whose representatives say they had committed no crime and were targeted only for their tattoos.Trump, in a scathing attack on the judiciary that would have been unthinkable coming from most presidents, demanded that the Supreme Court intervene.”It is our goal to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, and such a high aspiration can never be done if Radical and Highly Partisan Judges are allowed to stand in the way of JUSTICE,” Trump wrote in a post on his online platform Truth Social aimed at Chief Justice John Roberts.”STOP NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS NOW, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” Trump wrote in all capital letters.”If Justice Roberts and the United States Supreme Court do not fix this toxic and unprecedented situation IMMEDIATELY, our Country is in very serious trouble!”Roberts, who was nominated by Republican George W. Bush, a day earlier issued a rare rebuke by the country’s top justice to remarks of the president after Trump called for the impeachment of the judge who ruled on the deportation case.”For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said in a brief statement. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”On Saturday, James Boasberg, the chief judge of the US District Court in Washington, issued an emergency order against the deportation of Venezuelans as they sought legal recourse.He said that two flights already in the air must turn around. El Salvador’s President Nayyib Bukele, who has offered to take in prisoners on the cheap in Latin America’s largest prison, responded on social media: “Oopsie… Too late.”- ‘Woefully insufficient’ -In a new order on Thursday, Boasberg said an acting field office director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had explained that the Trump administration was considering justifying its actions by saying the issue was a matter of “state secrets.””This is woefully insufficient,” Boasberg wrote, saying that “the Government again evaded its obligations.”He said that a regional official in charge of immigration enforcement was not in a position to attest to cabinet-level arguments against a federal court.He gave the Trump administration until Tuesday to explain why it did not violate his restraining order.Officials said that 237 Venezuelans were flown to El Salvador, some of them as Trump invoked the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act to remove alleged members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal gang. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday he had confidence that the deported Venezuelans were gang members but that, even if not, they were illegally in the United States. A lawyer for one of the men, Jerce Reyes Barrios, said that he was a professional soccer player in Venezuela with no criminal record who applied through legal channels for asylum in the United States after demonstrating against Nicolas Maduro, the leftist president whose legitimacy is rejected by Washington and the opposition. The lawyer, Linette Tobin, said that US authorities accused him of gang membership based on a tattoo that in fact was associated with his fandom for Real Madrid.Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said that Trump was “refusing to accept that we are still a nation of laws and not royal edicts.”Gregg Nunziata, a former Senate aide to Rubio who now heads to Society for the Rule of Law, called Trump’s post on the judiciary “a knife pointed at the heart of our Constitution and worthy of impeachment on its own.”