Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a previously unreported phone call with President Donald Trump last month to discuss plans for a national AI regulatory body.
The call took place during the week of August 17, 2026, and was not made public until Politico’s West Wing Playbook broke the story more than two weeks later.
The proposed agency would vet frontier AI models for safety and establish testing protocols addressing cybersecurity and biological threats across the industry.
The watchdog body would also enact industry standards under the oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission, giving Silicon Valley labs regulatory predictability on AI development.
Nobel laureate and Google DeepMind scientist Demis Hassabis is the core proponent of the regulatory concept, having proposed a new AI standards agency modeled after FINRA in a July article.
According to a government official familiar with the matter, Hassabis briefed White House officials on the idea over the summer, bringing the proposal into active internal debate.
During the call, Zuckerberg told Trump the concept of a national AI regulator was “flawed,” though a senior White House official said he did not explicitly ask Trump to kill the idea outright.
Instead, Zuckerberg suggested that if such a body were created, its leadership should reflect Trump’s own light-touch approach to AI oversight rather than import a heavier enforcement model.
An alternative framework circulating inside the administration is associated with David Sacks, who holds an AI and crypto policy role in the Trump White House, and resembles a Motion Picture Association-style industry-led model.
That structure would leave the bulk of oversight work to the companies themselves, with government involvement limited to a lighter coordinating role rather than standalone federal enforcement.
Rep. Lori Trahan raised concerns about the call, signaling likely congressional interest in how private industry input is shaping consequential AI oversight decisions at the White House level.
The White House subsequently responded that “the Trump administration is committed to balancing innovation and security in AI policymaking,” offering no specific detail on which regulatory model it favors.
As of early September 2026, the administration is still weighing the FINRA-style regulator against the industry-led framework, with no final decision publicly announced.
