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The list of U.S. tech leaders showing support for President-elect Donald Trump continues to grow, with Sam Altman planning to donate $1 million to his inaugural fund.
The OpenAI chief executive plans to make a personal commitment of $1 million to Trump’s Presidential Inaugural Committee, a spokesperson told Fox News Digital (FOXA-0.37%) — not on behalf of his artificial intelligence startup.
“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 said in a statement shared with Fox News Digital and Quartz.
Altman previously told Fox News Sunday that he thinks Trump “will be very good at” supporting the U.S. and its allies to lead in AI infrastructure amid a race with China, and that he looks forward to working with the incoming administration.
“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,” Altman said.
Earlier this month, Altman said he isn’t worried about his former colleague and AI rival Elon Musk’s role in Trump’s White House. Despite there being “lots of things not to like about” Musk, it would go against his values to hurt competitors, Altman said during an interview at the New York Times (NYT-0.36%) DealBook Summit.
“I may turn out to be wrong, but I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power, to the degree that Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses,” Altman said.
Meanwhile, both Meta’s (META-1.68%) Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s (AMZN-0.55%) Jeff Bezos have also pledged $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund. Unlike Altman, the tech leaders made the donations through their companies.
