‘Political chameleon’: How Mark Zuckerberg charmed Trump and got his way on AI
By Clare Duffy, Adam Cancryn, Hadas Gold, CNN
(CNN) — It was a triumphant moment for Mark Zuckerberg. He sat at the center of last month’s White House AI meeting, with the CEOs of some of the biggest tech companies in the world signing onto a document he crafted for how to “self-police” and attempt to manage serious AI safety risks. After the meeting, Zuckerberg called it “historic.”
“I don’t think anything like this has come before,” he said outside the White House last week.
The AI accord is not a lone instance of Zuckerberg’s ascendancy in Washington, DC. He’s used his ties to Trump to help stymie the creation of an AI regulatory agency proposed by Meta’s rivals. The White House also helped get Zuckerberg off the hook for testifying in a planned senate committee hearing earlier this year.
It’s a far cry from the Mark Zuckerberg who President Donald Trump once threatened to send to prison, and the same Mark Zuckerberg who once reportedly once told friends and confidants that he was done with politics.
The Meta CEO’s rising influence in Washington comes at a crucial time. Government officials are scrambling to sort out AI policy amid growing safety concerns, and as Zuckerberg fights to earn his company’s place among the oft-chaotic and hungry industry. Meta is also looking to shape the conversation around youth online safety, following two court losses and a historic settlement over claims it intentionally created addictive and harmful platforms.
It follows a years-long push by Meta to bolster its relationship with the White House and Republicans — one that Zuckerberg and Meta pursued very intentionally.
Zuckerberg has frequently traveled to Washington or talked with Trump on the phone, allied himself with other prominent tech executives in the president’s orbit, and played a chief role in encouraging Trump’s own enthusiasm for the rapid development of AI models, people familiar with the dynamics said.
Trump, a former television star who remains closely attuned to people’s appearances, has also approvingly noted Zuckerberg’s physical transformation over the years from slender, hoodie-wearing Washington newcomer to a muscular billionaire who practices jiu jitsu and works with professional stylists, one of the people said. Zuckerberg was among the mixed martial arts enthusiasts who watched a UFC fight on the White House lawn with Trump in June.
“Mark saw that Elon (Musk) made a high-risk, high-reward decision in backing Trump before the election and saw how much influence he was having on the administration,” said Katie Harbath, a tech consultant and former public policy director for Meta.
“He realized that if he wanted to have that same sort of influence for the company, he was going to have to figure out how to repair relations — and what we saw (at the White House AI meeting) is a definite symbol that, for the moment, he has.”
‘Life in prison’
Like many in Silicon Valley at the start of the 2010s, Zuckerberg was friendly with former President Barack Obama, an early pioneer in using social media for politics.
But that shifted in subsequent years, as lawmakers and government officials on both sides of the aisle called Zuckerberg to task for issues on his platforms.
Then, shortly after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Zuckerberg temporarily banned Trump from Facebook and Instagram, over concerns about escalating violence.
Trump raged at Zuckerberg in response, accusing Zuckerberg of plotting against him, and threatening him with “life in prison.”
In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump warned that he would pursue “ELECTION FRAUDSTERS” who would be “sent to prison for long periods of time.”
“We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” Trump wrote in July of that year on Truth Social.
Just days after that post Trump would survive an assassination attempt during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A week later, Zuckerberg declined to endorse anyone for president but said “seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Weeks later, Trump said he liked Zuckerberg “much better now.”
Zuckerberg’s DC turnaround
When Trump won the election, many in Silicon Valley made the decision to support the president-elect, earning prime seats during the Inauguration.
Zuckerberg and Meta made a concerted effort to repair relationships within the GOP and align with the conservative faction of Silicon Valley that has succeeded in exercising broad influence over the administration’s tech priorities.
“(Zuckerberg) is very good at being a political chameleon. He’s a survivor in terms of his relationships in DC,” one person familiar with the dynamics told CNN.
Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago weeks after Trump’s reelection, and then began shoveling money toward the incoming president and his pet projects.
Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, a move that earned Zuckerberg a prominent spot on the dais alongside a bevy of other tech executives. The company was also one of the major initial funders to Trump’s White House ballroom project. Last year, Meta agreed to pay roughly $25 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Trump over his suspension from the company’s platforms, with most of that money set to go toward Trump’s future presidential library.
Republicans also point to Zuckerberg’s 2025 decision to tap longtime Republican operative Joel Kaplan as his main envoy to Washington — replacing former center-left British politician-turned-Meta global affairs chief Nick Clegg — for driving the political reset on Capitol Hill.
Meta’s subsequent rollback of content moderation policies that conservatives had blamed for “censoring” right-wing views on its platforms served as another overt olive branch to the Republican Party.
Zuckerberg later hired former senior Trump official Dina Powell McCormick as Meta’s president, an addition that the people familiar with the matter said was critical in establishing a friendly conduit between the company and Trumpworld. Powell McCormick — who was deputy national security adviser during Trump’s first term and is also the wife of Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Dave McCormick — has remained close to Trump and many of his advisers, and played what one of the people described as an outsized role in the AI policy debate.
“I said, ‘how did he think of that one?’ That was a good move, he’s very smart,” Trump said, in an apparent reference to Zuckerberg’s hiring of Powell McCormick as he showered praise on her during a speech on AI last week.
The relationship has proven fruitful.
Earlier this summer, the White House intervened after the Senate Judiciary Committee said it would call tech CEOs to testify about youth safety. Afterward, committee leader Sen. Chuck Grassley adjusted the plan from calling Zuckerberg to seeking testimony from his deputy, Instagram head Adam Mosseri, according to two people familiar with the matter. The hearing has been repeatedly rescheduled and doesn’t currently have a set date.
Zuckerberg was also among those who personally counseled Trump against a proposal championed by Google AI leader Demis Hassabis to create an independent AI regulator over the summer, a person familiar with the situation told CNN.
Bearing fruit
At the Chinese State Dinner last month, Zuckerberg took advantage of his prime seat assignment next to House Speaker Mike Johnson to discuss the leading issue looming over the AI industry and Washington: how to regulate AI, and what to accomplish at the White House meeting the following week between top tech CEOs and government leaders.
Zuckerberg, in conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, came up with the draft for the AI safety accord. Zuckerberg took the lead, with Huang weighing in on how to ensure the agreement would get broad industry support, a source familiar with the discussions said.
Soon, many of the executives that would be at the White House began exchanging messages about a “pact that allows us to implement standards, implement governance, and then have third parties check it and see it,” said Exiger CEO Brandon Daniels, who was at the meeting.
As they sat around the massive table in the White House’s East Room last week — Zuckerberg seated next to Huang, who was next to Trump — the group massaged the wording of the accord, which was printed out then and there. It was put together so quickly, it seems, that a typo in the word “United States” appeared in the copy posted by Trump.
Speaking to the press after the meeting, Trump pushed Zuckerberg to explain what they had signed, noting he thought the Meta CEO, “had a view that was, I thought, really right down, right down the middle.”
In his comments, Zuckerberg framed the accord as a way for the American people to have “confidence the technology works in the way that we intend.”
“The idea isn’t that this is the only thing that we will ever do, it is that this is a start and an accord that the whole industry can come to. And I was very proud to have that discussion,” he said.
Sources in the AI industry and Washington say it comes as a no surprise that Zuckerberg and Huang who spearheaded the “morally binding” accord, rather than anything with significant legal or regulatory teeth. Like Zuckerberg, Huang has argued against an industry-wide slowdown, saying the recent spike in safety concerns sparked by AI agents going rogue and hacking into other companies is just an engineering problem that needs to be solved.
“Zuckerberg’s messaging and Jensen’s messaging about their beliefs is simply closer to where Trump wants to be,” said one person familiar with the relationships, unlike other executives, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who have earned the White House’s ire for warning about AI’s risks.
A White House official told CNN the accord will “advance American innovation and strengthen responsible development” and that the administration “has worked closely with all industry partners, including Meta, to balance innovation and security in (superintelligence) policymaking.”
Meta declined to comment.
Yet even as Zuckerberg has grown closer to Trump, he’s continued to face deep skepticism in some corners of the president’s orbit. Some advisers wary of the risks posed by AI have grumbled over the influence wielded by wealthy outsiders like Zuckerberg, especially as Trump has increasingly gravitated toward their more accelerationist worldview.
Cozying up to Trump and Republicans could also be risky for Meta if Democrats take control of Congress in November — or the White House in 2028 — as some lawmakers continue to call for legislation that could hit the company’s bottom line.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren last month offered a preview of the harsh scrutiny that Meta might soon face, launching an inquiry into the ways it and other tech companies have benefited from Republican policies.
“Your company has spent lavishly to stay on the good side of President Trump, and it appears that you are now seeing your investment bear fruit,” she wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg signed by five other Democratic senators and demanding specifics on Meta’s donations to GOP groups and a litany of Trump’s own pet projects.
To that end, some in Trump’s circle say they simply don’t buy Zuckerberg’s transformation into a MAGA ally as anything more than political opportunism. And they argue that the outsized influence wielded by tech executives over the administration’s priorities has only ended up hurting its standing with Trump’s populist base.
“I would never have let him in,” lamented one longtime Trump ally. “I don’t understand it at all. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
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