Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has emerged as the leading candidate to become President Donald Trump AI czar, a source familiar with the discussions said Tuesday, as concern grows among lawmakers in Washington over the risks posed by artificial intelligence. The role was first reported by Semafor, and a second source told Reuters that no decision has been made.
Trump said Saturday that he plans to appoint an artificial intelligence adviser, known as an AI czar, and create an AI force, though he provided no details about either initiative or how they would be implemented. In a Truth Social post, he said the country would not hinder the growth of the industry but would watch for misuse through the existing criminal and civil justice system. He added that only high-IQ individuals need apply for the czar role.
Why Bessent
Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, already carries one of the heaviest portfolios in the administration. Trump tapped him to lead a major revamp of US trade policy, to negotiate with Ukraine over critical minerals, and to temporarily head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also serves as acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and his Treasury department is leading the push to isolate Iran economically through sanctions.
Adding AI to that list would make him one of the most overloaded officials in the administration, which is part of why some in Washington view the idea skeptically. Others argue his centrality is exactly the point: whoever holds the AI portfolio will need standing to negotiate with both industry and foreign governments, and Bessent has been the administration point person on economic talks with China.
The China connection
Bessent led talks on Sunday with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York ahead of this week summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington. The talks focused heavily on AI. Bessent told reporters afterward that Washington had proposed a new AI safety notification mechanism and a US-China AI dialogue, with particular emphasis on national security concerns.
That negotiating history matters for the czar question. An AI adviser who has already structured the US-China channel would be positioned to carry the file into the summit and beyond. It also explains why Treasury, an economic agency, is involved in a technology policy debate at all. The notification mechanism under discussion would reportedly require advance notice between the two governments of major AI developments, a structure modeled loosely on nuclear-era communication protocols.
A crowded and contested file
The AI czar role has no confirmed designee, and the policy environment around it is messy. David Sacks held an AI and crypto czar role in the first Trump term, but the current proposal appears to be a separate, dedicated AI adviser. Trump has repeatedly downplayed concerns about AI and argued that additional regulation is unnecessary, calling recent warnings from researchers a hoax while insisting the priority is beating China.
At the same time, pressure on the administration is intensifying from several directions. Twenty-nine House Democrats have demanded that OpenAI and Anthropic explain incidents involving AI agent escapes and called for congressional hearings. A lawsuit filed last week accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Google of an illegal agreement to slow AI development, after the four companies publicly endorsed the idea of a coordinated slowdown. Senator Josh Hawley rejected any antitrust waiver for safety conversations among the companies, calling it collusion.
Internationally, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are scheduled to brief the UN Security Council on Wednesday at a meeting on AI and international security convened by France. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue and Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN independent scientific group on AI, are also expected to participate, and Chinese firms DeepSeek and Moonshot have been invited to make statements. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged the leading AI nations to establish safety safeguards, and UN experts say safety measures are failing to keep pace with the technology.
What the role would actually do
Details are thin because Trump has not defined the position. Past czar roles in this administration have varied from genuine policy authority to coordinating jobs with little formal power. An AI czar could centralize the governments approach to compute exports, safety standards, federal procurement of AI systems and the emerging debate over frontier model oversight, or it could duplicate work already spread across the Commerce Department, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and national security agencies.
Industry reaction has been mixed. Labs that have called for outside testing and coordinated safety work would likely welcome a single point of contact. Others worry that a czar reporting directly to the president could override the rulemaking processes now underway at agencies, including the CFTC crypto and AI framework and the SEC work on tokenization, both of which touch AI adoption in financial markets.
The compute question looms largest. Anthropic has signed roughly $517 billion in compute leases over the past 11 months, and OpenAI, Nvidia and their partners are building data center capacity measured in gigawatts. Energy permitting, grid interconnection and export controls all sit at the intersection of Treasury, Commerce and Energy, which is another argument for putting the file under an official who already operates across those agencies.
Treasury had no immediate comment on Bessent possible new role. With the Trump-Xi summit set for this week and the UN Security Council briefing scheduled for Wednesday, the timing of any announcement remains unclear. What is clear is that the administration is under pressure to show it has a coherent answer on AI, and the person who ends up holding the czar title will define what that answer looks like.