OpenAI boss Sam Altman defended the Trump administration’s move to support artificial intelligence deals with the UAE and Saudi Arabia while blasting critics of the arrangements as “naïve.”
Several AI deals were announced during Trump’s recent Middle East tour – including a pact in which Nvidia and AMD agreed to sell thousands of chips to Saudi Arabia. Lawmakers from both parties questioned the deals over concerns that they lacked safeguards to prevent China from gaining access to the advanced US-made chips through third parties.
“This was an extremely smart thing for you all to do and i’m sorry naive people are giving you grief,” Altman wrote on X last Friday in response to a post by White House AI czar David Sacks.
Sacks said he was “genuinely perplexed how any self-proclaimed “China Hawk” can claim that President Trump’s AI deals with UAE and Saudi Arabia aren’t hugely beneficial for the United States.”
“As leading semiconductor analyst Dylan Patel observed, these deals ‘will noticeably shift the balance of power’ in America’s favor. The only question you need to ask is: does China wish it had made these deals? Yes of course it does. But President Trump got there first and beat them to the punch,” Sacks added.
Altman’s OpenAI announced plans last week to build a massive new data center in the UAE to support its AI efforts. Separately, Amazon Web Services unveiled an initiative for a $5 billion “AI Zone” in Saudi Arabia.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) blasted the Trump-backed chip deals in a floor speech on Thursday.
“This deal could very well be dangerous because we have no clarity on how the Saudis and Emiratis will prevent the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government, the Chinese manufacturing establishment from getting their hands on these chips,” Schumer said.
The Republican-led US House Select Committee on China also questioned the deals.
“Reports of new U.S. chip deals with Gulf nations—without a new chip rule in place—present a vulnerability for the CCP to exploit,” the committee said in a statement.
“The CCP is actively working to indirectly access our most advanced technology. Without a formal AI diffusion rule, deals like this risk creating backdoor vulnerabilities for export control circumvention,” the committee added.
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