Sriram Krishnan: 'There will not be an FDA for AI' — outgoing Trump AI adviser on light-touch regulation

Key takeaways from a Financial Times interview with departing White House AI adviser and former Andreessen Horowitz partner Sriram Krishnan (July 2026), his first in-depth interview since leaving the administration:

• No AI licensing regime: Krishnan said President Trump will not establish a formal licensing regime for AI — “there will not be an FDA for AI” — arguing a centralised agency requiring “a team of lawyers before you can get a model out” would put “sand in the gears” of the AI revolution.
• Deregulatory stance: He framed the administration as opposed “from day one” to “burdensome, onerous, bureaucratic red tape,” adding “we are not in the business of picking winners and losers.”
• Backlash blamed on industry messaging: Krishnan laid the growing public backlash against AI on the sector’s own “doomer” messaging, saying labs have “focused so much on the dystopian narrative” — job loss, existential risk — that voters are unsure they want the technology.
• Equity-for-the-public idea: He backed Trump’s push to get companies to donate equity stakes to the American people — discussed with OpenAI chief Sam Altman — despite Silicon Valley warnings it amounts to backdoor nationalisation, saying regular people should “feel like… I am benefiting.”
• National-security interventions: The comments follow the government forcing AnthropicDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → to withdraw its most capable model, Mythos, and holding up OpenAI’s 5.6 release; Krishnan supported the export-control move but said it was taken “very, very reluctantly” after Amazon flagged a vulnerability.
• Future oversight via industry: He argued long-term oversight of frontier models should pass largely to industry itself — a voluntary “clearinghouse” of tech groups, chipmakers and security companies working with the intelligence community — consistent with a recent executive order giving the government 30 days to review a model pre-release.
• Open-weight gap: Krishnan warned it is “very concerning” that strong Chinese open-weight models exist while “we don’t really have a leading American open-weight model yet,” and is now recruiting AI engineers to help Western governments develop AI policy.

Read more: Financial Times