Things were not looking great for OpenAI at the end of last year. The company had been struggling with major delays on its long-awaited GPT-5 and hemorrhaging key talent—notably, Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, and Alec Radford, the researcher who’d set the company on the path of developing GPTs in the first place. Several people who left either joined OpenAI competitors or launched new ones. The start-up’s relationship with Microsoft, its biggest backer and a crucial provider of the computing infrastructure needed to train and deploy its AI models, was being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission.

And then there was Elon Musk. He’d co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman and others, but the two had become fierce rivals. As “first buddy” to Donald Trump, Musk was suing OpenAI while rapidly building up his own AI venture, xAI, whose chatbot, Grok, has become a central feature on X. Amid all of this drama, Altman was notified by his sister, Annie, that she intended to sue him; she alleges that he sexually abused her when she was a child. (That lawsuit was filed at the start of this month; Altman and members of his family strongly denied the allegations through a statement posted on X.)

It’s remarkable, then, that with its latest maneuver, OpenAI has once again reestablished its dominance. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced the Stargate Project, a joint venture between SoftBank, Oracle, and OpenAI to pump $500 billion of private-sector investment over four years into building out U.S. AI infrastructure, with the intent of securing America’s leadership in AI development against China. Very little is known about how any of this will work in practice, but OpenAI is speaking as though it will reap most of the rewards: In its blog post announcing the partnership, it said that all of the infrastructure will be “for OpenAI.” The company’s president, Greg Brockman, underscored the point on X: “$500B for AI data centers for OpenAI.”

In one fell swoop, the project reduces OpenAI’s dependence on Microsoft, grants OpenAI (rather than its competitors) a mind-boggling sum of capital for computer chips—the hottest commodity in the AI race—and ties the company to Trump’s “America First” agenda, providing the best possible protective shield against Musk. (Musk blasted the project yesterday, alleging that it doesn’t “actually have the money,” which Altman then denied.) OpenAI (which entered into a corporate partnership with The Atlantic last year) did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear whether Stargate will even be able to spend $500 billion in four years. But consider just how astounding that goal is. In late 2023, as Microsoft started spending roughly $50 billion a year on expanding cloud-computing capacity, one semiconductor analyst had already declared that that was “the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen.” Rene Haas, the CEO of the semiconductor company Arm Holdings, said that even this pace of expansion across the industry would put global computing on track to consume more energy than India by 2030.

[Read: Microsoft’s hypocrisy on AI]

The move is a masterful display of Altman’s power at work. Altman has shown an uncanny ability throughout his career to get himself out of the toughest binds by leaning on his influential network, ingratiating himself with the powerful, and fundraising extraordinary amounts of capital. It was for these reasons that Altman successfully orchestrated his return to OpenAI as CEO in late 2023, after the board briefly ousted him. And it is why so many people have expressed alarm about his leadership in recent years. This week, he was at it again, standing next to Trump during the Stargate announcement in a symbol of solidarity and praising him later on X: “watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him … i’m not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!”

Although OpenAI has led the pack, many AI companies have worked over the past two years to influence policy and grow without government interference. Silicon Valley has always operated like this, and many other major tech CEOs took their place next to Trump this week. But the demands of generative AI are meaningfully different from, say, those of a traditional search engine or a social-media platform: Its development requires far more crucial physical infrastructure. Generative-AI models are of a size that necessitate the build-out of data centers at unprecedented scale. This, in turn, will give Silicon Valley outsize influence over the placement of power plants and even water lines across the country. Already, the past few years of dramatic data-center expansion have affected power reliability for millions of Americans and threatened to raise the cost of drinking water.

[Read: Billions of people in the palm of Trump’s hand]

The tech industry expertly laid the groundwork for this outcome: It made big promises about the wondrous potential of its technologies while creating a sense of peril by evoking China’s own technological advancement. During the Stargate announcement, Trump said that he would do what he could to strip away any regulatory barriers. “China is a competitor, and others are competitors,” he said. “I’m going to help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency. We have to get this stuff built.”

Standing at the same podium, Altman emphasized America’s leadership. “I’m thrilled we get to do this in the United States of America,” he said. And then, in recognition of his new benefactor: “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President.”

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Within hours of taking office on Monday, Donald Trump released a raft of executive orders addressing targets he’d gone after throughout his campaign, such as immigration, government spending, and DEI. He issued full pardons for 1,500 January 6 rioters, and signed the first eight executive orders—of dozens so far—in front of a cheering crowd in a sports arena. But amid the deluge of actions, Trump also signed an executive order that takes aim at his own federal bureaucracy—and allows his perceived enemies within the government to be investigated and punished.

The executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” opens by stating as fact that the Biden administration and its allies used the government to take action against political opponents. Democrats, it says, “engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Its stated purpose, to establish “a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people,” reads like a threat. The order calls out particular targets, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission—agencies that Trump and his supporters allege betrayed them under President Joe Biden. Trump’s team, led by whoever is appointed attorney general and director of national intelligence, will be sniffing out what it determines to be signs of political bias. These officials will be responsible for preparing reports to be submitted to the president, with recommendations for “appropriate remedial actions.”

What exactly those remedial actions would look like is not clear. The vagueness of the order could result in a “long-running, desultory ‘investigation,’” Quinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, told me in an email.

But the information gathered in such investigations could lead to some federal employees being publicly criticized or otherwise punished by Trump. And beyond theatrics, this order could open the door to the “prosecutions that Trump has threatened against his political opponents,” Jurecic noted. Put another way: In an executive order suggesting that Biden’s administration weaponized the government, Trump is laying out how his administration could do the same.

Trump’s Cabinet is still taking shape, and whoever ends up in the top legal and intelligence roles will influence how this order is executed. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney-general pick, is an established loyalist with long-standing ties to Trump (he reportedly considered her for the role in his first term, but worried that her past scandals would impede her confirmation). Bondi, in her first Senate confirmation hearing last week, attempted to downplay Trump’s persistent rhetoric on retribution, and avoided directly answering questions about how she, as head of the Justice Department, would engage with his plans to punish enemies. She said that she wouldn’t entertain hypotheticals about the president, though she did claim that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has a history of political shape-shifting, though she has lately shown fealty to MAGA world.

Well before Trump took office, his allies were signaling their interest in turning federal bureaucracy, which they deride as “the deep state,” into a system driven by unquestioning loyalty to the president. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote in 2023, some conservatives have argued, without even cloaking “their aims in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient,” that bureaucrats should be loyal to Trump. Russ Vought, the nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget (an unflashy but powerful federal position), who today appeared before Congress for the second time, has previously written that the executive branch should use “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

The executive order on weaponizing the federal government is consistent with the goals of retribution that Trump expressed on the campaign trail. And accusing rivals of using the government for personal ends has been a favored Republican tactic in recent years. Still, this order confirms that, now that he is back in office, Trump will have no qualms toggling the levers of executive power to follow through on his promises of revenge. Many of Trump’s executive actions this week are sending a clear message: If you are loyal, you are protected. If not, you may be under attack.

Related:

Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message. Why 2025 is different from 2017

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s second term might have already peaked. The attack on birthright citizenship is a big test for the Constitution. You’re being alienated from your own attention, Chris Hayes writes.

Today’s News

A shooter killed at least one student and injured another before killing himself at Antioch High School in Nashville. Donald Trump said last night that by February 1, he would place a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products. He has also pledged to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico by the same date. An Israeli military assault in the occupied West Bank began yesterday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 40 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Be Like Sisyphus

By Gal Beckerman

This anxious century has not given people much to feel optimistic about—yet most of us resist pessimism. Things must improve. They will get better. They have to. But when it comes to the big goals—global stability, a fair economy, a solution for the climate crisis—it can feel as if you’ve been pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it come rolling back down, over and over: all that distance lost, all that huffing and puffing wasted. The return trek to the bottom of the hill is long, and the boulder just sits there, daring you to start all over—if you’re not too tired.

Read the full article.

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Watch. I’m Still Here (out now in select theaters) tempts viewers into a comforting lull before pulling the rug out from under them, David Sims writes.

Examine. In an age of ideological conformity and technological brain-suck, the world needs more disobedient artists and thinkers, Jacob Howland writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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