Artificial intelligence has long sparked dystopian fears in the public imagination: What will human society become when it can reason not just faster, but also more deeply, than we can? What will we do when computers are able to take actions beyond human control?

Yet while speculation has raged about this this so-called singularity, AI has achieved something else at least as breathtaking—and almost entirely unanticipated. In the weeks since U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration, AI and the financial interests behind it have gained unprecedented control over the government.

This has largely come about through Trump’s decision to radically empower Elon Musk, an unelected individual who has undergone no congressional scrutiny or ratification, to reshape the government. As the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk has wrought havoc on one Washington mainstay after another, including foreign aid, the Pentagon, and the departments of Education, Treasury, and Health and Human Services.

Musk has also started to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has actively regulated some of his businesses and overseen others that he seeks to develop, including lending and finance through X, formerly Twitter. Across the federal government, the Trump administration is purging civil servants in large numbers while using AI tools to inspect spending and operations to reduce costs. “This is deregulation by firings,” Adam Levitin, a professor at Georgetown Law, told the New York Times.

In recent days, while Trump and Musk have justified these actions as urgent and long-overdue measures to increase government efficiency and cut waste, it has become increasingly clear that Musk’s power also risks subordinating U.S. interests and institutions to the surging AI industry, a highly competitive frontier of the economy in which Musk is heavily invested.

The range of potential conflicts of interests is little short of astonishing. If Musk and Trump overcome the rising tide of court orders temporarily blocking many of these early power grabs—whether through successful judicial appeals or simply defying the courts—there will be little to stop the massive and sudden incursion of AI into the nitty-gritty of government.

If left unchecked, DOGE’s access to sensitive and confidential information about millions of Americans contained in Treasury Department records and elsewhere could deliver what may be the most lucrative commodity in the coming decades—data—into the lap of the country’s new AI baron.

Musk, the world’s richest man, is best known for his electric vehicle (EV) company, Tesla. But there is reason to believe that he may soon pivot to prioritizing his AI ventures, where access to data is as important as computing power. Think about Tesla’s complicated position in China. Recently, its sales in the country were dramatically overtaken by BYD, a young and innovative Chinese EV maker. BYD saw a 41 percent increase in sales in China last year and sold more than five times more vehicles than Tesla there.

But as excited as he may be about auto sales, BYD founder Wang Chuanfu prefers to crow about the data that his company’s dominance on China’s roads provides. “If the data from a car is a drop of water, then BYD has an ocean of it,” he said recently.

The rise of BYD and other fast-moving Chinese car manufacturers may be convincing Musk that the future of his immense fortune is less tied up in au tomobiles than in the control of data. This is not to say that Tesla is about to fail, but now that China can produce EVs with navigational systems and overall quality that are just as good or better for under $10,000, a fraction of the price of a Tesla, Musk may decide that this is a good time to change tack.

Musk’s role as Tesla’s CEO also points to numerous potential conflicts of interest. On Feb. 13, news outlets reported that a State Department contract to spend $400 million on armored EVs with Tesla was edited to omit any reference to the company after reports of the contract sparked backlash. There is also the question of Musk’s business in China, where much of Tesla’s manufacturing is based. This week, the company opened a massive $200 million battery factory in Shanghai. Musk’s influence over Trump seems unrivaled; this was on display on Wednesday when he held forth from the Oval Office with his child in tow, while the president sat mostly looking on. Will Musk take advantage of this by weighing in on China policy with a view to promoting or preserving his own commercial stakes? Given Musk’s unusual position astride the government, what is to stop him?

There are hints elsewhere of Musk’s growing interests in AI. As I noted in a recent column, Musk took potshots at other big AI players in the first days of the new administration, when he criticized a joint initiative among industry leaders—including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, a bitter rival of Musk—to expand investments in AI infrastructure. This was a bold move, as it came just after Trump had met with Altman in the White House and given his enthusiastic blessing to the venture.

The scope of Musk’s ambition in this sector has become clearer since then, especially after the surprise announcement this week of his $97.4 billion hostile bid to take over OpenAI, which many consider to be the leading U.S. player in the sector. Altman’s response dripped with sarcasm: “I wish he would just compete by building a better product, but I think there’s been a lot of tactics, many, many lawsuits, all sorts of other crazy stuff, now this.”

An attempt by Musk to control or derail OpenAI may indeed be an indirect acknowledgment that his own AI venture, xAI, does not measure up. But when one can combine the ability to steer government policy with the world’s largest fortune, competing on a level playing field is beside the point. What regulator or prosecutor will rein in Musk as long as he is so closely allied with Trump?

The growing fusion between the administration’s interests in AI and Musk’s own was also clear this week at the AI Action Summit in Paris. Musk did not attend the global gathering on the future of the technology, but Vice President J.D. Vance did, and he sounded every bit Musk’s surrogate on his first overseas trip since taking office.

In Paris, Vance, who once invested in AI firms as a venture capitalist, eschewed diplomatic niceties as he spoke forcefully about Washington’s determination to dominate AI and warned Europeans against tight regulation of the sector. Musk displayed rare discretion in not showing up to the summit, where he could easily have overshadowed Vance, but in the end, he probably got what he wanted anyway.

Trump’s first few weeks in office have been characterized by frenzied, almost dizzying busyness, much of it designed to lay waste to long-standing norms. His administration’s highly publicized actions—from campaigns against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies to the dismantling of customary workplace job protections through dismissals, lockouts, and buyouts—should be understood first as immense provocations: shiny lures dangling from hooks, aimed at capturing attention. The same is true of many of Trump’s unrealistic early foreign-policy ambitions, including turning Canada into a U.S. state and taking over Greenland and the Panama Canal.

That could also be said about Trump’s statements about expelling Palestinians from Gaza and redeveloping the territory as a U.S.-owned “Riviera.” But in surprising ways, even this may point back to the trend of rising new fortune seekers in AI, the internet, and cryptocurrencies. Although neither Musk nor Trump is known to be connected to the movement, since at least 2019, a group of tech billionaires has advocated building a futuristic city from scratch on the Mediterranean through a company called Praxis.

This is not to say that Trump’s proliferating distractions are not harmful, or that they don’t threaten the social fabric or international order. They do. But the main order of business right now seems to be something else: the pursuit of fantastic profit through emerging technologies such as AI and digital currencies. The outrage that many of the new government’s actions are calculated to arouse only keeps the public’s attention elsewhere.