Sam Altman – the gay CEO of the massively influential artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI – has announced a $1 million donation to Donald Trump’s inaugural fund.

The tech pioneer expressed his eagerness to work with the president-elect to ensure the United States remains a leader in AI and the creation of the infrastructure around the new technology.

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“President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” Altman told the New York Times.

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He further emphasized his faith in Trump on Fox News Sunday, discussing the “incredibly high stakes” of AI’s development.

“AI is a little bit different than other kinds of software in that it requires massive amounts of infrastructure, power, computer chips, data centers, and we need to build that here, and we need to be able to have the best AI infrastructure in the world to be able to lead with the technology and the capabilities. I believe President-elect Trump will be very good at that.”

 “It does seem to us like this is going to be very important,” he continued. “It does seem like this will be one of these unusually important moments in the history of technology. And we very much believe that the United States and our allies need to lead this.”

The United States must lead on AI innovation, he explained, because adversaries will also be using the technology. “We’ve got to use it to help defend American troops,” he said.

Altman’s announcement comes on the heels of Amazon and Meta also announcing $1 million donations to the inaugural fund. Altman, however, will reportedly be donating the money from his personal funds, whereas Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg will be making the donations through their respective companies.

Many believe the donations are a sort of olive branch to the incoming administration – an attempt by tech companies to smooth over their once-hostile relationships with Trump (out Apple CEO Tim Cook also recently had dinner with the incoming president).

OpenAI is the tech driving the popular ChatGPT chatbot and DALL-E image generator. It has already revolutionized writing and art, leading to worries of the tech cannibalizing creators’ works, replacing humans in numerous work fields, and allowing people to create convincing “deepfakes” of famous people doing and saying things they actually never did.

Congressmembers worry that AI could also help perpetuate “false information, data privacy, copyright abuses, and cybersecurity” risks, The Washington Post reported. Some have worried about its potential to create widespread cyber-scams and disinformation floods, causing AI to be “riskier perhaps to human survival than the advent of nuclear weapons.”

To stop potential abuses, Altman expressed support to Congress for the creation of a government agency that could help set safety standards and audits to prevent AI from breaking copyright laws, instructing people how to break laws, illegally collecting user data, and pushing false advertising. This agency would regulate AI products similarly to how the Food and Drug Administration oversees ingestible products and medications.

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