A Peter Thiel protégé is leading Trump’s AI strategy against China
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. WASHINGTON : Many Trump administration officials work on national security or artificial intelligence. Michael Kratsios is thinking about how they collide.
Confirmed by the Senate on Tuesday to lead the Office of Science and Technology Policy, he is taking charge at a pivotal moment in the AI race with China. The Chinese startup DeepSeek rattled lawmakers in January when it released a powerful model trained at much lower costs than U.S. competitors.
That raised pressure on the Trump administration to limit China’s access to advanced U.S. chips without disrupting American businesses abroad. The Commerce Department on Tuesday added dozens of Chinese companies to a trade blacklist.
U.S. companies need government approval to sell to those businesses in China. Kratsios cut his teeth in the tech industry for several years as one of venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s top deputies.
After Thiel was one of the few Silicon Valley executives to back Donald Trump in 2016, Kratsios got a top tech policy role in the first Trump administration and briefly oversaw research and engineering at the Defense Department. Following a nearly four-year stint at the startup Scale AI, he has returned to government under a much brighter spotlight. “The stakes are a lot higher this time around," Kratsios said in an interview.
Work at the Office of Science and Technology Policy includes everything from ultrapowerful quantum computing to modernizing the nation’s telecom systems and researching the world’s oceans. He expects to spend a lot of time coordinating among agencies. “People will look to him as the person who’s really going to set things in motion," said Chloe Autio, a tech policy consultant to companies and AI
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