He assumed the job last week after his predecessor, Chris Fall, abruptly resigned after spending weeks trying to get Anthropic to add stronger safeguards to prevent jailbreaks of its most powerful Fable 5 model.
CAISI staff were in meetings with Anthropic’s technical teams for weeks as both sides hammered out new safeguards that were deemed strong enough for Fable 5 to be brought back online, WIRED previously reported.
National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross
Photo-Illustration: Darrell Jackson; Getty Images
Sean Cairncross has taken a more hardline approach towards Chinese AI labs.
Cairncross has an outsized role in potential attempts to regulate Chinese AI, and he is empowered at the White House to develop a policy to counter the potential national security risks of AI. He helped put together President Donald Trump’s June 2 executive order that laid out a framework to assess the most powerful AI models.
A former political campaign lawyer who most recently was at the Republican National Committee, Cairncross lacks any tech or AI experience.
But current and former staff credit him with trying to grapple with the hard national security problems posed by AI, and allowing his staff to work without micromanaging every problem in a manner a tech software engineer might.
In particular, Cairncross and his chief of staff, Lara Smith, have been focused on curbing Chinese labs from training their models off the backs of top US models in a practice called distillation.
In response to a request for comment, White House spokesperson Elizabeth Huston says that the administration’s deliberations on Chinese AI are centered on trying to bolster US AI.
“The United States leads the world in AI innovation, and President Trump will keep it that way. The Trump Administration is doubling down on innovation to widen the gap between America and the rest of the world,” says Huston.
Former AI Czar David Sacks
Photo-Illustration: Darrell Jackson; Getty Images
Tech investor David Sacks has remained one of the most influential advisers on AI for Trump, maintaining a direct line to the president even after he departed his role as AI czar in March.
